I'll wait to see the last half on DVD

Rating: 2/10 (13 March 2007)

This review is based on the first 30 minutes; I walked out about the time the hunchback was talking to Leonidas about wanting to fight for him. I thought this movie seemed very much like a comic book, and then found through these other IMDb reviews that it WAS based on a comic book! The sensual half-naked female dancing early on seemed out of place and almost pornographic, and the sex scene that followed struck me as totally unnecessary, at least the way it was inserted into the film. I suppose that today's young movie-goers will love it, but from my experience of watching 60+ years of movies this was the highest technical-quality B-movie I've ever seen. The closeups of nearly everyones' faces was technically excellent, but the monotone of the color (lack of color) and high contrast finally bored the hell out of me. It seemed like the sun never shone and all the lighting was from a very low angle, and then it was filtered by fog or clouds or precipitation; just too artfully stylized and contrived lighting. Overall what I saw was very much like the original "King of Kings" by Cecil B. DeMille, only with sharper image quality, and electronic sound track. Come to think of it, the pictorial style seemed to be modeled closely in the style of the baroque painter Caravaggio. But, again, without the use of color.
I will wait to see the rest of the movie when it comes out on DVD, so I can fast-forward through the tedious parts, of which there seem to be a lot according to other reviewer's accounts.