Among the Worst Films of All Time

Rating: 1/10 (18 November 2009)

The Four FAILS of 300:
#4. LOOK MA! "STUNNING VISUALS!" No-one can say Zack Snyder doesn't know how to use a green-screen, but unfortunately he's also a fan-boy with no apparent concept of taste or restraint. We're assailed by slow-mo moments of "Look! I'm cinematically rendering a page from a comic book!" not every half an hour or every fifteen minutes, but every FIVE minutes. At least. It gets old really really fast.
#3. AND SLOW-MO ACTION! The same goes for the slow-mo action sequences, which are cool the first time and the second time, and okay the third time... and a snooze by the fifth time... and a joke by the ninth time... and just keep on coming. They're skillfully executed but ultimately dull, like an overlong Joe Satriani guitar solo.
#2. WORST. Voice-over. EVER. It's tolerable for a movie based on a comic book to have a bit of cheese factor. Those stupid loincloth outfits the Spartans are wearing? Okay, fine, I'll squint and bear it, it's a comic book. But that voice-over. Oh my God, that voice-over. It's so ridiculous, so painful, so unintentionally funny, that it would put 300 almost in "so bad it's good" territory if it wasn't for...
#1. FRANK MILLER'S NEED OF INTENSE PSYCHIATRIC CARE. The comic book 300 was written by Miller when he was embarking on what I like to call his "I'm the god damned Batman" phase or his Nutso Period: the part of his career where his work deteriorated into an insane cartoon of a cartoon. It's funny that defenders keep trying to talk it up as a fun, apolitical action flick, because it's as plain as day that Miller takes pains to slap the reader (and thus, Snyder slaps the viewer) square in the face with his politics at every opportunity. And that's not just bad... it's worse than bad.
If it were just that his Spartans talked in a mishmash of Objectivist drivel, movement-conservative cant and macho cliché -- which they do -- it would be bad enough. But what makes it worse than bad is just how creepy, ugly and fascistic Nutso-Miller's politics really are. The whole story is structured around eugenics, with Persians and traitors and "mystics" representing deformed and subhuman evil and the Spartans representing the purity of selective breeding; there's a whole subplot about Congress, sorry, I mean the Spartan senate trying to stab Leonidas in the back by daring to restrict his absolute power; there's praise not just of courage, but of hatred, anti-intellectualism and intolerance.
That ugliness makes 300 disturbing and unpleasant, in addition to being boring and stupid. Not a good combination.