Tonight... We dine.... at Chuck E Cheese!!

Rating: 5/10 (26 March 2007)

The first few times I saw the trailers for 300, I thought I was watching an advertisement for a Playstation 3 game. Or maybe one for the X-Box 360.. or the Nintendo Pi or whatever that thing is called that gives everyone couch potato elbow. Anyway, it looked like some sort of video game cutscene, and that's basically what this movie is: Two hours of Blizzard's crack team of game designers crafting the heart of every top-selling video game - the cutscene.
As we know, the cutscene's purpose is to fill up the gaps between game missions, where a lot of fighting takes place, with lots of fake looking blood, very little plot advancement, set to a monotonous rock soundtrack in a carefully controlled environment designed to sanitize out those nasty historically correct elements such as, say, swastikas on German aircraft, or dangling genitals from spartan battle dress. You know, things the kiddies aren't really ready to see yet. The cutscene is the place where simplistic dialogue and juvenile storyline happens. Since 300 is a movie and not a video game, it spends a little more time on the cutscenes and a little less on the battle scenes.
Because this story is designed to look like a video game, it plays out as one also. Soldiers all look the same and everything else is exaggerated and made more "extreme". Wolves look like bulimic runway models but still have the tenacity of a shark, war elephants are so big they should have Orlando Bloom hanging from them, and every Spartan looks like he's on a part-time sojourn from his gig at Chippendales. All looking very caucasian, eyes getting bluer and abs getting oilier with bravado. Even the hunchback's hunch is muscular. Oh, and the Persians look like Moors for some reason. I guess Hollywood's Villain-O-Matic has rounded the dial, so to speak, and is back at 'black' again.
The canyon that most of the battle takes place in looks eerie and otherworldly, except for the wheat field that someone forgot to roll up after Gladiator finished shooting, and the spurting blood looks as if someone shot the contents of a lava lamp from a confetti cannon.
Actually, I rather enjoyed the exaggerated look of the whole endeavor, but couldn't they have at least made the characters a little more interesting?? This is based on a comic book for chrissakes! Aren't the characters supposed to be 'bigger-than-life'? While there were apparently three different Spartans (the shouting bearded one, the one missing the eye, and the multi-xeroxed one), the rest of the cast featured a hunchback, some lepers, and Rupaul after a night of heavy drinking and piercing. How do go wrong with that?? It's like the scriptwriters from Underworld found their way onto the set(Could you have imagined insurance seminar speakers led more exciting lives than werewolves and vampires?).
This is an R-rated feature, but it's pretty suitable for 11-15 year old boys. Yes, there's a few female breasts and a decapitation on par with something from an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon to make the young'uns feel like they're watching something for grown-ups, but I'd avoid letting your older ones see this. At least not without having drank enough to not wonder why a Spartan turncoat would bring a purse bursting with Persian payoff money to a city council meeting.