Okay but not great

Rating: 6/10 (8 March 2007)

The hype will kill this film far more effectively than it's quality. It can't live up to it. Is it a bad film? No. Is it a great film? No. It's a good one with some big problems. The first is the script, which is TOO close to Frank Miller to work. You notice how shonky the plotting is, how laughable the dialogue is the moment it is read out aloud. Or in Butler's case, shouted at the top of his lungs. There are no characters, just poses. No-one to root for, no-one to boo. So you're left with the action and the look of the film.
The action is pretty good at first but not quite the great you hope for from the trailer. It's like everything is geared so closely to looking like the comic book that they forgot that means a lot of slowed-down or static shots that get a bit boring. Even more boring is the look of the film. Every shot in the film is washed out and rusty and that gets tired very, very fast. Apart from blood red in the battles that's all you get and you really long for something different just to break it up. It's the most boring use of colour in years. Taken with the animating out of many of the actor's features to touch them up to look more like cartoons it just blands everything out. Even when the singing goat turns up in Xerxes tent it looks a bit ordinary and samey.
So, some good battles but it never flies because everything looks the same and you don't care about anything or anyone that happens. On the Arnie scale, with Terminator being the tops, Total Recall being great, T3 being okay, Raw Deal being weak and Red Sonja being the pits, I'd give this a T3.