When nipples attack!

Rating: 1/10 (10 September 2007)

Ugh. Where to begin with this pile-up? It occupies some truly weird place where homoerotic tough-guy worshiping meets up with right wing, pro-male, pro-war machismo. Here it is: someone's most delirious homo-erotic dream AND a hetero guys most brainless, macho fantasy. I'll let you tell me what that means for the culture. I'm baffled. This movie was offensive to me from the first few minutes. If you missed the offenses, you're pretty dumb.
Somehow, it takes a crowd of hetero guys to come up with a movie this gay (and this anti-gay!!!). Top Gun was the previous upper limit for heterosexual homoeroticism. A homosexual would have probably reached their fill before devising a half-naked villain in a speedo who wears eyeliner... probably way before our butch, half-naked hero throws a pole at him and hits him in the mouth (Mmmmm, very subtle...). And to turn the Spartan army which in reality was an ARMY OF LOVERS, into an army of homophobes. Uh yeah, OK, whatever.
I made it through very little of this junky, stupid movie. At about the 2 minute mark, the painfully dumb narration turns out to be issuing from the mouth of a drippy character who announces that Sparta has to go to war with the Persians because the Persians "don't believe in reason!" Uh huh... sure. You go to war to defend reason. Yeah. That sounds terrific. Oddly Sparta doesn't strike me as a place where anyone has ever picked up a book, or debated anything past their initial caveman grunts. 'Reason' never even makes a token appearance. How's that for perfunctory plot motivation?
By the 7 minute mark I was already thoroughly tired of the stupid script, the stupid delivery style (every line is shouted as a rallying cry) and the anti-gay provocation. Every line is a fresh piece of horsesh*t pseudo-poetry that gets shouted. Even the passing of gas would be announced by one of these hard-ons shouting: "I JUST FAHRRT-TED!!!!" If you shout every line, it must be profound and passionate right? ...or absolutely, profoundly stupid. Every frame is pretty, but it's as shallow as a movie can be, making it a worthy successor to the very vapid Sin City. The silly production design seems to cause all the remaining nonsense I could bear to fast-forward through. If you're going to war, would you only wear a speedo? If you go to Sparta to announce that Spartans are your new scapegoat, do you stand a foot away from the decorative hole to infinity at the center of town?
Frank Miller & Gerard Butler are on my boycott list after this homophobic crap. Would anyone make a movie today in which we root for an army that vilifies black people? Why do these schmoes get a pass on this deeply objectionable movie? Butler is a Neanderthal. Good luck pulling your career out of the hole it's in Gerard. You might consider whether the scripts you accept reflect current values or those of fifty years ago. How many anti-straight-boy movies could these fan-boys put up with? Let me tell you, when Hollywood eventually starts making them, they'll be long overdue.
The ideal audience for this may be heterosexuals mourning the lost "culture of virility" with man-boys pining for a time when they weren't towing the line of women cutting them off from sex to get their way.