I'm Off to Take a Cold Shower..

Rating: Null/10 (12 March 2007)

I love this movie  but certainly for all the wrong reasons!
My first suggestion is that Snyder and Warner Brothers fire the entire marketing department. This is definitely not, as they may think, a movie for the impressionable 18-30 male demographic, with its fairly obvious homophobic overtones and clichéd, war-like call to arms (did the US Marine Corps put up the money?)
No, no. This, my friends, is a movie for the 40+ female demographic, with acres of lush male flesh on display and muscles so tight you could hear them rippling if the soundtrack weren't so loud. (I recommend you turn your hearing aids down ladies. You won't gain much insight from listening to the dialogue anyway.) I haven't seen this many well toned abs since my Opthalmologist gave me a tricky new prescription for bi-focals, and I wandered by accident into the wrong locker room at the gym! If I hadn't taken my husband and son with me, the theatre staff might well have had to scrape me off the floor at the end of the show. Did the ancient Spartans really fight in Speedos?
Seriously, I guess I have to say something intellectual about the actual movie, not just the natural wonder of Messrs. Butler, Santoro and Wenham's physical attributes, which are very much on display here. This movie was interesting on several levels - not least because it's the first film I've seen in a long time where the men had bigger chests than most of the women, although, gratifyingly, the women appeared to have more gray matter between their ears than the fellas  and I really don't quite know what to make of the suggestions that it's really a Neo-fascist call to make war on Iran. I mean, are the American public really that gullible? If so, I'm handing back my Green Card and heading back to Europe faster than a quarter would bounce off Vincent Regan's pecs. This movie must have been 5 years in the making, from the first glimmer of an idea in Zack Snyder's heated brain to its display on the Santa Cruz cinema screen. Is the guy really that prescient? Personally I find it hard to believe. Some of the critics of 300 need a sense of humour infusion.
I think I'm just going to settle for being totally disingenuous, and take 300 entirely at face value, as a re-creation of a comic book, and leave it at that. And as a re-creation of a comic book (sorry but nothing on earth is going to induce me to call them "Graphic Novels" even though I know that's the politically correct thing to do. I know a comic book when I see one. Fanny Hill is a "Graphic Novel". It's a novel and it's graphic.) it works pretty well. It's certainly a fine display of technical movie making, very stylized and a bit thin on plot but very well edited, and if you want depth and complexity, go and see The Departed instead (which I did a couple of weeks ago, and it's terrific.) Neither should you expect too much historical accuracy, but then this IS Hollywood. This movie is unapologetically gory and violent, but in a cartoonish way, has a multitude of nipples on display of both genders, and no one, but no one, can possibly not know what they are letting themselves in for when they shell out their 10 bucks and buy a ticket.
Gerard Butler gives an honest, engaging performance as King Leonides, a man who clearly loves his wife, as we see during a mildly erotic interlude where they trot briskly through a variety of positions for our, and I hope their, pleasure. Lena Headey plays a strong Queen Gordo; I'd forgotten just how good she is, although there were moments I thought she might be channeling Queen Amidala. David Wenham, clad in slightly more costume than he wore in Better than Sex (but only just), remains firm-jawed after losing an eye in battle ("Never mind  I've got a spare!") although I found his delivery of the narration ever-so-slightly irritating. He does a great cockney accent but his "Queen's English" is less convincing (to a Brit, anyway.)
This may well become a cult classic. Personally I think I'll buy the DVD and keep it on a permanent loop on the screen of my laptop with the sound turned off. It could enliven many a dull moment at our quarterly management meetings! Definitely one for the girls.