Hollywood's first big Gay epic movie

Rating: 1/10 (8 March 2007)

Men in black bikinis. Sweat pouring off their pumped up bodies.Did film auteur David DeCoteau (Voodoo Academy, The Brotherhood and Wolves of Wall Street) have a hand in this creation?
If American fan boys flock to this film, there may be other reasons why they spend all their time with their fan boy friends down in their parent's dark, deep basement. Maybe basement is the new word for closet! There must be some reason why girls their age are so interested in yaoi.
The homo erotic tension left me gasping from testosterone more than a few times.
What little story there is, Frankensteined from bipartisan history, could have easily been played out in a half-an-hour format on TV. For an epic film it lacks all that made Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur and the like, epic films. Unless limb chopping has become elements of a good story and strutting/marching is now considered a sub-plot --- this film offers no frigging story line. There's a wicked queen, well, I guess he's supposed to the King of the Persians. Some pumped up gym rats who don't like the evil Queen. There's also a good wife and a bad politician. (Is there any other kind)
(BTW: Bad guys are deformed. Good guys are half-naked and look like underwear models. I guess that's the new twist on pointing out who's good and who's bad. It used to be that bad guys wore black and good guys wore white, now it's who's deformed and who isn't)
The cardboard characters spout off (I had such a hard time understanding Bulter's dialog, I gave up) cheesy lines and they all seem so disconnected from this ancient battle. The battle itself reminded me of the disco era when on any given night throngs of saps were clamoring, literally stepping over each other to gain entrance into some trendy nightclub. That is what the battle scenes looked like, only without the leg chopping, wild costumes, gayish grunts,sweat, muscles and the whole mano-a-mano atmosphere. Well now wait a minute, I do believe that's exactly what it looked like back then. Perhaps Miller lived in the village during the 70s. I don't know.
The lowdown: 300 men (in black bikinis and spa robes) hold off a prissy horde numbering in the hundreds of thousands. That's it. So I ask: Was there nothing more compelling from a historical perspective, well, I know there was and Miller must have known that too. Lot's more, in fact, portions of the real Spartan history would have been more interesting than the end result of this film.
Even if they didn't use "what really happened", why didn't they come up with something more than a soap-opera sub-plot, I mean, the double crossing politician is so 80s.
My final thought on this wreck of a film is, are we over Frank's Miller juvenile scripting yet. May we now move on to better story lines that are more than excuses to use "gosh-gee-whiz" technology and creative blood-letting?
No. I didn't like the CGI sets/backgrounds at all. When I choose to play a video game I accept cartoon graphics. When I plucking down 12 bucks to get in to a movie, I expect better.