plodding comic book

Rating: 3/10 (11 March 2007)

I was able to enjoy this film by imagining that I was watching an animated comic book. It's a kind of entertainment that makes no demands of us: it just encourages us to sit back and uncritically eat up the eye-candy.
And there were many annoying problems in the film that needed to be ignored. Visually, we are treated in every scene to badly overmanipulated images: gritty foregrounds, backlit beautiful people, wheat fields, fantastic skies, and so on. In some scenes, eyes were glowing. The closeups slide in on lips, eyes, helmet details, and other comic-book fetish objects. If you've grown up with art that consists of sunset calendars, cheap posters, video games, and comic books then you won't mind it.
Accompanying these eye-candy cliché visuals were a bad mix of guitar riffs, celtic folk songs and electronica.
The action scenes were the kind of stop-motion that was used so effectively in Matrix. But here they are used to give the look of a jerky video game. It's far over-stylised and cliché for my taste. Over and over we see thrust, then a splash of blood, another thrust, another splash of blood, slice, a spash of blood. Like, who cares? This film makes Batman movies were subtle and complicated.
King Leonidis is a big silly man with a Scottish accent who gives big silly speeches to a group of contestants from a body-building show. There is an oddly homoerotic aspect to these men in tight underwear and capes. The villain (Xerxes) has a similar look except he's got painted eyebrows, soft trembling lips and wants men to kneel before him.
This is a film of cheap sentiment, cliché visuals, a badly mixed-up soundtrack, and an ambiguous position on homosexuality.