Too old, too tall, too American, too introverted and mumbly to be a mesmirizing leader of men and commanding presence at court, perhaps your first thoughts on hearing about a new big screen “Napoleon” were “Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon Bonaparte? LOL.”

I know mine were. The new Ridley Scott movie didn’t really disabuse me of that prejudice, either.

As a screen subject, “Napoleon” foiled Stanley Kubrick and sorely challenged anybody else who took a shot at rendering the emperor/conqueror in a big screen epic.

He’s been played by Brando and Rod Steiger, Herbert Lom, Claude Rains, Tom Burke, Daniel Auteuil and Armand Assante among others. Few register.

Ian Holm got two cracks at making Bonaparte an object of fun, as a whimsically grumpy commander who loved people (dwarves) shorter than himself in “Time Bandits” and an even grumpier exile in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

Scott’s magnum opus is a collection of red letter dates in Bonaparte’s rise and fall, a couple of brilliantly realized set-piece battles, and the big love story that is a part of the man’s myth.

We see his cold-bloodedness, his cruel calculus and flashes of ego.

But do we learn anything about the man who brought public education, The Napoleonic Code and measurement standardization to Europe, used science to govern, a dictator whose arrival promised to end European nobility and the class structure that benefited from monarchies and winner-take-all economies? Do we glimpse the potential greatness which prompted Beethoven to compose his “Eroica” symphony for the young commoner who promised to bring down the kings?

No. We get instead a bit of a pot-bellied slob, with Phoenix’s costumes somewhat less custom-fit than most of his co-stars. We get the petulance and the ego.

“You think you’re so great because you have BOATS,” he bitches about the British.

What we’re treated to is very much an Englishman’s idea of Napoleon, gauche and common and bloodthirsty and callous, two and a half hours of that. Scott has announced that the film will be over four hours long when it transitions to Apple TV+. Yay.

Phoenix is a quirky actor and can’t help but make the character interesting, from his sleepy-eyed cunning in watching the tides of the French Revolution to his canny professionalism — an artilleryman who knew how to break the British blockage of Toulon — feeding his confidence and growing sense of invincibility.

That triggered his rise. Josephine of Martinique (Vanessa Kirby)? Nobility widowed by the Revolution, she became his great passion, and his cuckolder, unable to stay faithful while he marched through Italy and Egypt, unable to produce an heir when the champion of The Republic decided he’d make a fine emperor and needed to sire a royal line.

Scott cast good actors but typically not “names” to play the other major figures in this early 19h century historical drama. Rupert Everett stands out as Napoleon’s Waterloo foil, The Duke of Wellington, and is plainly 20 years too old in the part. Phoenix, at least, was the right age by the Waterloo crescendo, and looks younger there than he does in the early scenes when the character was in his early ’20s.

The panorama or the battles, the glorious effects that recreate the burning of Moscow all are somewhat muted by the many characters — Tallyrand and Robespiere to King George III among them — shortchanged by the somewhat dull and cluttered narrative.

Scott chose to shoot the entire picture in an autumnal gloom, which does nothing for staving off drowsiness in the action-starved scenes of the middle acts.

And while we can marvel at the fact that Scott got this project with this budget and this cast made, one is left with the gnawing feeling that there isn’t much point to his “Napoleon,” that there are no messages/warnings for today in his narrative and that maybe his “take” on the character is more superficial than deep, more British monarchist than revolutionary and more set-pieces and romance than historically accurate and insightful.

Rating: R for strong violence, some grisly images, sexual content and brief language

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby, Rupert Everett, Paul Rhys, Edouard Philipponnat
Youssef Kerkour and John Hollingworth

Credits: Directed by Ridley Scott, scripted by David Scarpa. An Apple Studios/Columbia Pictures release.

Running time: 2:38

Rating: R for strong violence, some grisly images, sexual content and brief language

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby, Tahar Rahim, Rupert Everett, Paul Rhys,
Youssef Kerkour and John Hollingworth

Credits: Directed by Ridley Scott, scripted by David Scarpa. An Apple Studios/Columbia Pictures release.

Running time: 2:38