Quite a laugh really. Take it with a pinch of salt, relax and enjoy

Rating: 7/10 (24 July 2009)

Whether you like, enjoy, rate or simply hate 300 depends almost entirely on what you expect. Don't expect history. Apart from the fact that the hero is the Spartan king Leonidas, fetchingly portrayed by a muscle-bound Scotsman in skimpy shorts and a cape, and the film portrays - very loosely - the historical battle of Thermopylae when a tiny Grecian force held a far larger Persian force at bay, this is more fiction than fact. For example, and quite crucially: a lot is made of 'freedom' in 300, that no Spartans will bow to the Persians etc blah, blah. 21st century demotic thought at its finest, paper-thin and millimetre deep. And fair enough: banging the drum about 'freedom' and 'liberty' always goes down well in the freedom and liberty-loving West which values freedom and liberty so much, it is prepared to sacrifice whole nations in the quest to introduce democracy to the world. The speech given by Leonidas's queen to the senate could have been written in the White House four years ago when it desperately tried to justify it invasion of Iraq. More pertinently for Hollywood, of course, a liberal use of the word freedom lends a spurious philosophical glamour to any dross they care to churn out. But inconveniently, Sparta had nothing to do with freedom: only one in five of the inhabitants of Sparta were free men. The rest, or most of them, were Helots, slaves who at a certain time of the year could be killed by any Spartan with impunity. So much for 'freedom'. But as I say, if you are looking for fact, don't bother with 300. If you expect a literary script, again the only sensible advice is to avoid 300. It you are averse to the graphic portrayal of gore, although gore redeemed by being so highly stylised that it is largely unreal, don't bother. If, on the other hand, you are quite entertained by slasher movies, sword and sorcery and all things Tolkienian (does the word exist?), give 300 whirl. Oddly enough I don't like slasher movies, sword and sorcery or all things Tolkienian at all, but as a piece of superior bubblgegum movie-making and movie-watching 300 somehow hits the spot. It is, it has to be said, complete and utter cobblers (and that is not an obscene word, dear American friends). But what I like is that it has no pretensions whatsoever. None at all. It follows in the tradition of Sin City, another film based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, and its scenes (I read) follow the graphic panels of the novel virtually seamlessly. And that is the key to it. 300, like Sin City, is the graphic novel in movie form. Naturally, simply because it is a 'comic' doesn't mean it need not have literary quality but nor does it mean that it should have one either. The dialogue is almost of the 'Me Tarzan, you Jane' school of writing with one or two lines of cod philosophy. But neither is there a necessity that it should have a great script, and to criticise 300 because it doesn't have one misses the point entirely as does taking the film seriously on any intellectual level whatsoever. This is film-making, for goodness sake, money-making, entertainment. Viewed with that in mind and 300 can be forgiven quite a lot. So if it is way, way, way over the top, from the CGI-enhanced muscles of the Spartans and Xerxes, all metal piercing, eyeshadow and chains who is surely a gay icon somewhere to the quite impossible battle scenes, all of whom were so obviously generated on the latest Apple Macs, who cares. Was it a failing of P T Barnum's extravangazas that the elephants couldn't recite Shelley? 300 is way, way, way over the top and unashamedly proudly over the top, almost like the best drag act you have ever seen. As a piece of film-making 300 is not original - Sin City was merely because it got in there first - but in an odd sort of way it is still satisfying. So it doesn't matter that Leonidas sounds as though he is from Paisley in Scotland, or that Xerxes seems to have just arrived from a rich man's fetish party, or that The Immortals, the Persian king's fearsome bodyguard are superbly ridiculous. Who cares. 300 is an outright romp and none the worse for that. Elsewhere you will read, as always that this is either the best film ever made or so bad the director should have been jailed. It's neither. If you agree to it on its own terms, it is rather good. Shakespeare it ain't, but then anyone who has seen Titus Andronicus will know that sometimes Shakespeare wasn't, either.