Bloody awful!!

Rating: 1/10 (26 February 2007)

I saw this movie as part of the Dublin film festival and it was one huge disappointment!! In fact it was so bad it made me feel really angry that it could be so trite. I like Frank Miller novels and I really enjoyed the exciting pace, the innovative style and cartoon-like gore of Sin city, which I thought was great; and I am a big fan of big visually stunning movies, old and new, and action flicks (Ben Hur, star wars, LOTR etc). But 300 I found really, really bad.
First of all, it is full of clichés with lines like "I never told him how much I loved him", which the Captain says after his son dies in battle (predictable!), or "enjoy your breakfast for tonight we dine in hell" (Arnie would be proud!). Even Gladiator has better lines than this, and that was a pretty poor movie. Similarly the love story between the Leonidas and the Queen was plain Hollywood drivel and pointless to the film's plot - clearly it was only there so that the filmmakers could include the obligatory sex scene.
There is no character development whatsoever, because the action moves so fast, so actually you don't care about who dies. A lot of scenes are lifted straight from other movies (the arrow scene from Hero; most of the battle scenes, and especially the overview of the battlefield and the rhino charging from LOTR; even the ships scene from Troy).
Xerses is one big camp villain in the best "Carry-On" style who just looks so ridiculous, it amazes me how the Spartans did not break down laughing at his Darth-Vader impersonation, though Leonidas does his best to live up to the comedy factor with his cheeky-chappie lines (e.g. when asked by Xerses to kneel, Leonidas responds that he can't because he has a pain in his leg, from killing too many Persians. I mean COME ON).
This film is one big video game, from the flying limbs and fighting scenes down to the hard rock guitar riffs on the soundtrack, and maybe that was the point of it, but if that's the case then why not make it into a game in the first place??
I have only one positive comment to make and that is that the actors all really seem to put their hearts in it (and their bodies, given that they must have trained pretty hard to get to such required physical condition, which was impressive), but to me that is small consolation in an altogether incredibly bad movie.