300

As silly as it is stylish, 300, based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller, follows a small group of hardened Spartans, led by Gerard Butler’s King Leonidas, as they take on Persia’s seemingly limitless army. Director Zack Snyder has infused 300 with an overblown and thoroughly cartoonish sensibility that loses its novelty almost immediately, as the filmmaker generally stresses egregiously broad action sequences over compelling characters or a halfway interesting storyline. Far more problematic is an ongoing emphasis on the backstabbing political shenanigans of Leonidas’ fellow Spartans, as such sequences essentially grind the proceedings to a dead halt – with this vibe primarily due to the overt lack of reality within the film’s universe (ie in a movie overrun with goblins and demons, there’s simply no place for debates that would surely feel more at home on C-SPAN). The end result is a film that’s sporadically engaging but mostly dull (!); for every effective sequence (ie a slow-motion, Oldboy-esque episode in which a grizzled soldier takes on a whole host of attackers), there are two or three more that just fall flat and, more often than not, go on much, much longer than one might’ve liked (with this particularly true of a speech towards the end that just feels endless).

** out of ****

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