300 ***

The Wargasm Lives Up To Its Name

Director: Zack Snyder

Writers: Zack Snyder, Frank Miller, Kurt Johnstad

Starring: Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, David Wenham, Rodrigo Santoro, Dominic West

As he is about to slaughter a messenger sent from the invading king Xerxes, King Leonidas is told that his actions are madness. "Madness?" he says coolly. "This is SPARTA!!"

The film - which otherwise is spurred along by a preposterous sscript and stunning visuals - is peppered with similar powerful non-sequiteurs. It's a shot of speed in the arm, an adrenalin rush and a teenage war fantasy - which is as you'd expect from a comic book movie (although so many fail to deliver - see Ghost Rider review). It offers a Spartan plot (ho ho) and doesn't demand much of its actors beyond shouting and dying quietly. In fact, whenever they are required to do more than this, the film veers dangerously close to B-movie territory, with the main sex scene being among the worst in recent memory. Yet Gerard Butler is a commanding, toned presence onscreen, Rodrigo Santoro cuts an impassive figure until he opens his mouth, and David Wenham is a little too muted but otherwise stoic in the face of such an appalling script. I mean, it's all very well to lift straight from the comic book when you're making a self-deprecating, noir thriller (a la Sin City) but this film is not self-conscious enough to entirely pull it off.

Comparisons with Sin City are inevitable - after all, it is based on the graphic novels by Sin City creator/co-director Frank Miller, and is shot using the same technique (apparently Frank Miller insisted on it). And like the Old Town of Basin City, Sparta is brilliantly realised, burned sepia-brown, wind-scorched and teeming with women wearing assorted sexed-up versions of the toga and buff men in underwear and not much else. There is much talk of freedom, of resisting oppression, of respecting women and similar narcissistic things which don't really exist in this society but which are often brought up to rouse men to fight.

Snyder - best known for commercials and his dark, dank 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake - is a little overly fond of the slow-mo button (used especially well once, as Leonidas slices through Persians in the early stages of the battle), but other than that utilises the CG-technique to great effect. It is very violent, but the violence is so stylistic that it never truly cuts deep. Like most of the movie, really.

300's racial politics - at best out-dated, at worst blatantly racist - are simple: black baaad, white gooood. The Persians are played by a range of actors from non-white backgrounds - African, Indian, Chinese - and all decked out in gold regalia (to symbolise their preoccupation with wealth), even though Persia is in modern-day Iran (and presumably Persians looked similar to modern-day Iranians). In a movie so graphically polemic, there is no room for nice Persians. Baddies are often hideously (and inexplicably) deformed or surrounded by willing and mystical women to show just how bad they really are, and just in case you didn't get the message, Xerxes' army is led by a group of highly-trained fighters who seem to be wearing Darth Vader masks.

Yet in a film so fraught with tension, drama, violence and visuals, it is churlish to quibble over a little thing like historical accuracy or racial representations. It is better to eat your popcorn and enjoy the blood-drenched, homoerotic, fiercesome spectacle of the battle scenes, and the mythical world Miller created.

IN CONCLUSION: Sin City it is not, but it doesn't pretend to be. A comic book movie that watches like a video game/teenage wet dream, the visuals alone are worth paying the ticket price for. Which is good, because there's not much else here.