Madness? Nope, just tedium.

Rating: 5/10 (11 July 2007)

If going to the movies in 2007 has taught us anything so far - besides that Nicolas Cage should send his agent to one of Eli Roth's hostels, that Tarantino still refuses to make anything other than glorified B-movies, and that numbers still aren't scary no matter how much a wild-eyed Jim Carrey tries to convince us of it - it's that "Spartan" must be Greek for "Speedo". Seriously, was anyone in this movie wearing a shirt? I haven't seen so many half-naked men since I went to that topless bar in Thailand a while ago. Still, being the endlessly tolerant and open-minded person that I am, I had no problem with the raging homoerotic nature of the film - I did sit through Batman and Robin without problems. What did bug me was how boring the whole bloated thing was. Two hours of comic book dialogue spliced with ridiculously brief action scenes and a Gerard Butler who looks and sounds like he just stumbled in from a System of a Down concert, just after a brief visit to ZZ Top's hairdresser. In a Speedo.
The one thing this dullsterpiece has going for it is obviously its visual style, which is often striking. However, call me a hopeless ADD case if you wish, but I need a movie to be more than just pretty to look at if I'm going to follow it for almost two hours. For a movie with no plot besides one gigantic battle, there is a suspiciously small amount of battling! It's like being trapped in a video game for an hour and a half before you find the "attack" button. Not that there's anything terribly wrong with movies imitating video games, but I prefer when it's the other way around. Interestingly, the dialogue and character development of 300 is somewhat on par with that of Super Mario World, minus the charisma of Yoshi. I was wondering when Xerxes would reveal his secret collection of mushrooms (how else do you think he got so abnormally tall?).
Anyway, despite being hyped as an all-out action-fest so violent it would give Michael Bay epileptic seizures, 300 is so dull you'll be squirming in your seat. It's a Greek tragedy in the sense that it's tragic that a stylized, cheesy action flick for repressed geeks can be classified as a masterpiece these days. Are we really this starved for entertainment?
Well, at least I learned a new word. I would earnestly suggest that you do not watch this film, unless you want to have some laughs at how ridiculously overblown and convinced of its own greatness it is. The average score I gave it is only because of the visuals and the half-naked ladies.