Ridley Scott’s surprisingly hollow biopic of the French military commander falters as a character piece and comes shy of victory as an epic.

For a film with as many contradictions as Napoleon, it’s odd for it to be so straightforward. It covers 28 years, but it never feels like a lot of changes. It’s over two and a half hours, which, while not a herculean runtime, never entirely slows down. Perhaps it’s because it never really gets started. Ridley Scott’s latest opens with a public decapitation of Marie Antoinette (Catherine Walker), giving way to the 1793 Siege of Toulon. The violence is often unsparingly graphic, so why, then, does it feel so cosmetic? Shouldn’t a live horse eviscerated by a cannonball to the chest do something to the viewer?

Maybe not when there’s such little context. If Napoleon is one thing, it’s episodic—ahistorical, even. David Scarpa’s script begins in the trenches and is content on staying there. Everyone and everything are simply window dressing. That includes Napoleon Bonaparte himself (Joaquin Phoenix), whom the film oversimplifies from intrinsically flawed leader to wholly externalized man-child. After the Siege, he wins the affections of Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby). The two soon marry.

It’s a relationship of manipulation and droll humor the film isn’t bothered to get invested in. Napoleon often works as a vessel for war scenes, with the rest as connective tissue. It ostensibly follows Bonaparte’s rise and fall until his death in 1821, but given how the film’s intermittent structure prevents it from accruing any momentum, there is no true ascent, much less a crash. It sees its characters as circumstantial. Worse yet, its interest in the politics surrounding them borders on nonexistent. Acid spit would be one approach to this story, as Scott and Scarpa seem to aim for at points, but they settle for ambivalence.

Instead, Scott livens up Napoleon on a strictly macroscopic level. The violence itself is inherently upsetting if unmoving in context, but Scott and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski’s mise en scène exists just at the cusp of something grandiose. Their work is often layered in composition, propulsive in motion, while stoic in staging. It’s never momentous, but in some ways, that’s appropriate. Only in such moments does Napoleon balance its technical bombast with the fatalistic bent of its story. Meanwhile, Arthur Max’s production design remains up to snuff, even if Scott often isolates it from the characters at hand.

There’s a bizarre lack of setting to the whole experience. Rather, the actors exist on their own planes physically and emotionally. Phoenix oscillates between hamming it up and folding into a demeanor that hints at a more destructive pathos, and while his work gels with the film’s humorous streak, it renders the character lost in his own story. Conversely, Kirby does good work with a role the film doesn’t care for. She manages to excavate a cleverness from Joséphine’s past—which, again, the movie bypasses—grounding moments that otherwise edge on self-parody in the process.

And yet, against all odds and flaws, Napoleon isn’t particularly dull despite being a 158-minute passive viewing experience. The editing from Claire Simpson and Sam Restivo maintains a coherence to the more spectacular moments but allows the runtime to putter along. Alas, it’s easy to see what could have been: the class commentary, the fatalism of it all, the metaphor of the male ego vis-à-vis the historical epic itself.

Scott has mentioned the existence of a 270-minute director’s cut. It’s not a satiating prospect, but one must wonder how much substance got the axe before coming to its theatrical form here. The end title cards list the increasing death tolls from Bonaparte’s battles, which point to something pointedly cold—grim, even. But Napoleon lacks the work to stick that landing, faltering as an epic and a character piece. It’s one thing for a movie to not care for human insight. It’s another for it to fail to engage with conflict in any meaningful way, inside or out.