A movie made for teenage boys, so it'll do really well on IMDb

Rating: 7/10 (12 March 2007)

But, hell, while it's far from perfect, I'll admit that it's a lot of fun. Put it into the guilty pleasure category if you will. It goes for the title of violentest movie ever, and I think it succeeds. Much of the movie consists of the Spartan warriors hacking away at Persian fodder, with limbs flying everywhere, with an occasional head thrown in for good measure (I was slightly disappointed that there were no entrails to be found). Sick as hell, yeah, but I think most of us have a little part of our brain left over from our uncivilized ancestry. Honestly, outside of the action sequences, the film is fairly worthless. The dialogue is overwrought and often embarrassing, with a heck of a lot of narration telling us about what it's like to be a Spartan. The exposition is lame (except for maybe the prologue  the part with the wolf was kind of cool). The trip to Thermopylae is dull, even when we find a tree with a hundred corpses impaled upon it. And, during the battle, whenever they show us what's happening in Sparta, I was always like, "Who the *expletive deleted* gives a *expletive deleted*! Get back to the endless slaughter!" The movie would have worked a hundred times better if it had just been 90 minutes of straight battle, with the only pauses being the tense, dark nights between them. So, really, the movie isn't all that great. But, hell, I have to give it my recommendation. Any movie that features a decapitated head spiraling through the air in slow motion has to be worth the price of admission.