Alternative history lesson revealing how Napoleon escaped St. Helena, leaving behind a dead ringer to fool his British jailers, and how he returned to France but not all the way to the throne as planned. A well-mounted production, handled with care by television director Alan Taylor (The Sopranos, Sex and the City, The West Wing, Homicide), and acted with commitment by Ian Holm, Iben Hjejle, and others. Yet the level of amusement comes nowhere near matching, and thus justifying, the level of absurdity: hard as it must be to find an exact facial likeness of anybody, it would be quite a bonus to find it on so undersized a frame into the bargain. (For Holm, this might not be the most advisable follow-up role to that of a waist-high Hobbit, quite apart from the English accent in which he gripes about English cooking, and the twenty or so surplus years of age he brings to the part.) And if screenwriter Kevin Molony shows good taste in the New Yorker cartoon he chooses to plagiarize -- "How about never? Is never good for you?" -- he shows poor judgment in attempting to pass it along in the 19th Century. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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