Peplum porn: the Passion of the 300 Steve Reeves battle overwrought direction, design and acting

Rating: 2/10 (10 July 2008)

I'm a big fan of the Peplum genre, i.e. Italian Sword & Sandal films of the late 1950s and 1960s. The genre is criminally underrated and many of those films are colorful, action packed and fun. So naturally watching "300" was a given of sorts, even though everything about the trailers and the publicity told me that I wouldn't like it. The trailers showed continuous scenes of Gerald Butler screaming his dialogue, which made me laugh out loud and the whole thing has an obvious fascist slant which automatically made me weary but I thought I'd watch it for its artistic merits. Well, I shouldn't have bothered.
First, I needed to press mute button because the dialogue was painful. PAINFUL. Worse than any badly dubbed Italian film. Thank god I didn't see this at the movies where you can't turn off the volume.
Second, though the film is sorta great to look at, the tone and general aspect of the direction is so fascistic that any artistic pleasure to be had was nullified from the get go. It's as if the director thought: "Well, to justify the entire near naked male cast, we'll go overboard with portraying every character as one-dimensional and as ultra-macho as possible so any wussiness associated with the concept of all these near naked men will be eclipsed to most viewers." See also my first point above about this.
The film is clearly meant to be watched as a visual experience and the 300 Steve Reeves move about like a synchronized special effect, their moves, appearance and ejaculating blood are what basically constitutes as acting here. And anyone bemoaning historical inaccuracies is really barking at the wrong tree. It's a visual interpretation of a historical event, nothing more. I just wish the tone wasn't as unpleasant as it was (fascist, racist, sexist, etc). But as visual as it was, the whole thing is simply too processed and there's rarely a believable moment in it. It looks too sleek and designy. Heck, TRON was more believable than this. In the end the visuals lacked gravitas.
Third, the direction is overwrought and over-baked. Again, I suspect the director overcompensated here to tone down the wall-to-wall beefcake. In fact, the whole film is just an extreme tug-of-war of two waring concepts: how to visually showcase 300 Steve Reeves with the most base, simplistic and repellent machismo ever to appear on screen.
When all is said and done though, "300" is the biggest fetish movie of all time, even more than "The Passion of the Christ". There are some folks out there who actually get off from images of muscular men, dressed as gladiators, being stabbed or skewered. For them this would be their Holy Grail. It's perfect Peplum Porn.