Hilariously mediocre and moronic

Rating: 3/10 (23 March 2007)

Well, what to say that hasn't been said elsewhere? I would like to think I went into the movie with expectation rather than prejudice and I think I ended up feeling somewhat let down. Okay, well, what did I like about it? I enjoyed the fact it was very noisy, and occasionally it looked very pretty indeed, and it wasn't very taxing, but, alas, it was rather overwhelmed by a lot of other bits that just bored me. I had had the good sense to realise that it wasn't going to pay much attention to likely history (which is fine, because neither did most of the classics), but even with all of that, a great deal of the bits in between the fighting scenes I found to be utterly unengaging, probably because of the completely expectable nature of it all. It didn't help that the script and the acting were both incredibly flat (I've not read the comic book, so if it has been lifted directly, then I can only imagine it worked much better on the page), and whilst I wouldn't want for a labyrinthine plot in this kind of eye fodder, something other than absolutely predictable linearity would have been nice (I mean, even the crappiest Bond movie can do that.) I did enjoy the occasional blasts of irony which I am pretty certain were deliberate, and some of the especially stupid bits made myself, and a number of other viewers in the cinema I was in, laugh out loud (mostly involving monsters or animals), but overall, the biggest failing I felt this picture had is that after about twenty minutes I realised I didn't really care for any of these characters because none of them had been given a character (there was less of this here than in "Soldier", for goodness sake), and after about thirty minutes I realised I wasn't going to be given any reason to care,either, and so after that, I was mostly waiting for it to end. Which it did eventually, and that was lovely.