Watchable but still bad

Rating: 3/10 (15 August 2007)

I gave this film a generous 4 stars but it's not one I would particularly watch again (except with the accompanying RiffTrax by Mike Nelson and co. - actually looking forward to that).
I enjoyed the comic series for what it was - it was well-paced and nicely illustrated - but this film failed to invoke the experience of the comics. There are some well-done action scenes (the film even manages to make a sex scene into an action scene, although it comes off as more amusing than erotic) and endless scenes of guys getting impaled, decapitated or whatever, but it's all very thin. There is very little behind it all, despite it being based on historical events. Even Braveheart (a movie I no longer appreciate as much as I used to) managed to instill its battle scenes with some weight.
Comparisons have been drawn between this film and a video game and they're not unfounded. Blood flies everywhere, but it's all fake and doesn't land anywhere. Impalements, dismemberments and decapitations abound but when the camera pans to the battle scene, nary a drop of the red stuff is seen anywhere. It's like the film cut costs by avoiding the use of fake blood. Whatever the case, it looks fairly silly and adds to the "weightlessness" of the film.
Then there are the beasts and monsters that appear in this movie, making the film something of a "historical fantasy" but they really don't add much to anything. For one thing, the CGI is terrible, notably for a wolf and some elephants. As for the elephants, they are described as being "clumsy," so why should I care? There is a war rhino that is, of course, utterly ridiculous and an ogre's fight with Leonidas is just an all-too familiar rehash of recent cinematic melee. There is a thing with the cleavers for forearms that was just bizarre and I don't know what the story is with the goat-headed guy. These scenes are merely "eye candy" and don't add much else to the film.
The performances were ridiculously overstated, I thought, making the dialogue come off as cheesy. For instance, David Wenham, the actor who helped assassinate the character of Faramir in LoTR, was even worse here. He adopts an odd and unappealing narrative voice and just seems to go on an on, especially at the end of the movie.
And then there's the villain, who almost makes everyone else look better by comparison. Rodrigo Santoro's performance would be utterly laughable if it were not almost painful to watch. Why Frank Miller decided to depict Xerxes in the comic book this way, I can't say, but one can more easily overlook Xerxes' appearance there. Here it stands out like a, well, a bunch of fake body piercings.
I could go on and on, but I think the only way to see how bad it is is to watch it.