300

300 is some good, solid entertainment, and easily the best action film I've seen all year.

In a nutshell, it's a retelling of the ancient Battle of Thermopylae, in which a small cadre of Spartan warriors led by King Leonidas (Gerard Butler in what is surely the role that will launch him into stardom) took on a much larger force in the form of the Persian army and inflicted severe losses on them before being killed to the last man. Of course, that it was directly adapted from Frank Miller's vision of that battle adds another dimension to the filmmaking altogether.

The end result is an hour-and-a-half-long, magnificently shot and choreographed fight scene, abetted by some highly stylized visual effects which embody the best "real actors against virtual backdrops" film so far since the genre was launched with Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow a few years back. If appreciated on these terms, then the film is pure delight.

Apart from that, it's not what I'd call a brilliant film, and anyone who's seen Gladiator and Sin City is sure to recognize their love child, with a little DNA infusion from the Matrix. In short, one of its maladies is that it suffers from a lack of originality.

Another is a script with some rather halting dialogue. I remember how Peter Jackson (or was it Fran Walsh) when accepting the Academy Award for the Best Adapted Screenplay congratulated the actors for being able to spout out some difficult dialogue. On the off-chance the scriptwriters should be similarly rewarded for their efforts they should be doubly grateful because just as 2005's Sin City carried some of Miller's clunkier dialogue onto the screen, this movie does the same.

Still, apart from the stunning action sequences and set pieces, the film boasts yet another asset, and that is Butler. His acting is unabashedly over-the-top, which is presumably his way of dealing with the larger-than-life persona Miller bestowed upon Leonidas. His charisma is such that even though the screen is filled with men in leather thongs, all with virtually identical bodily proportions he still stands out for the sheer ferocity of his performance. The other actors, with the exception of David Wenham who plays the narrator and Rodrigo Santoro who plays the disturbingly strange God-King Xerxes, kind of just melt into the background.

As spectacular as the fight scenes are, though, one finds oneself desensitized to the violence after the first five minutes of the big battle. And yes, I will concede the point raised by many reviewers that the repeated device of slowing the action down and showing in great detail the dismemberment and/or impalement of the Spartans' enemies does get old pretty quickly, to the point where everything seems more than a bit cartoonish after awhile. Gamers should absolutely love this movie, especially when the decidedly anachronistic rock music starts to play; it feels out of place in a period film but right at home in a stylized video game.

These shortcomings notwithstanding, one cannot take away from director Zack Snyder, who remade Dawn of the Dead some years ago, what he has achieved, and that is a visually-arresting spectacle that faithfully translates its source material to the big screen. I won't even go into the political interpretations of this film because I don't think it was meant to be digested with anything even approaching depth; it's just a rip-roaring good action yarn and not much more than that.