For Sparta?...Unfortunately I'm Not

Rating: 5/10 (12 March 2007)

300: **1/2 out of ****
300 is the tale of the 300 Spartans who stood up to and defied the grand army of the Persians. This is about all the story you get for the film but I'll touch on that a little later. First lets start of with the good. This is a gorgeous film. The nicely polished green/blue screen effects are wondrous. They make the film look like the graphic novel has come right off the page and onto the big screen (it takes a true director to make film look like paper). The acting in this film is very good. I loved Gerard Butler's commanding performance as the Spartan king. He elevates the movie by leaps and bounds. In fact the film has no real weak performances at all. Everyone in the film looks absolutely of the time. The Oracle was amazing, and I loved the character of the hunchback, though I do not recall his name. Therein lies the first problem I had with this film. There was no strong character development. Beyond the hunchback and maybe one or two of the other characters they were all cardboard cut outs with biceps.
I loved the opening of the first battle where they are running at each other and they collide into mass chaos, but then it swiftly transferred into one overly stylized battle scene after another. The slow motion fighting was cool the first time you saw it but wore thin very quickly. If all the action had been sped up to real time the film would have been substantially shorter.
I also couldn't stand the digital blood. I found it distracting and cheesy. And what was with that random sex scene? It served no purpose to the story. But it was the monsters that really slammed the nail into the coffin. I just couldn't buy into the time period and the peril of the story when you had the Immortals running around looking like Dracula. I also didn't like that they introduced that giant globular looking beast who came in and decapitated on of the Spartans and you never see him again. i'm sure he's somewhere on the cutting room floor but it would have still been nice to see something happen to him. I'm also not sure why they increased the size of the Elephants. For some reason they are like three times as big. Same thing with the rhino.
I also thought that the two times that the heroes get attacked with arrows was right out of the film Hero, and they were put to better effect in that movie. My biggest problem had to be that I didn't find the film engaging in any way. The action didn't even grip me. I was bored and couldn't help feel I'd seen it all done before. Pretty much everything I liked about the movie I had already seen in the trailer. But a movie with a goat-man can't be all bad. It is worth taking a look due to, mainly, the look of the film but I'd definitely wait for DVD!