Review – The Duellists

So is there a law or regulation somewhere that requires all movies about the Napoleonic era to be deadly dull? Director Ridley Scott starts with a source story by Joseph Conrad, but everything in the movie except the duels themselves are as boring as Kubrick’s adaptation of Thackery. Two French officers (Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel) get crossways of one another and duel on several occasions as Napoleon seizes and then loses Europe in the background. Like Kubrick’s failure, this too is a visually stunning but otherwise unrewarding production. Mildly amusing