Review: 300

Based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller, Zack Snider's 300 tells the story of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480BC, when 300 Spartan soldiers mounted a suicide mission against the million-strong Persian army to buy time for Greece. Shot in the style of Sin City, a much more succesful adaptation of another Miller graphic novel, with live action film against blue screens and sets and landscapes added digitally in post-production, 300 is a ludicrously bad movie that fails spectacularly on so many levels.

Its parade of identical male characters essentially lack any character, being so utterly two dimensional that you simply don't know them or identify with them, a flaw meaning that you feel no sense of concern for them when they enter battle.

The film glorifies fascism, setting the Spartans and their obsessive, bloodthirsty king as heroic, with an all-too-obvious parallel that posits their small army as defenders of humanity going up against insurmountable odds, just like 'our boys in Iraq' - complete with massed, imbecilic Marine-like grunting.

The fight scenes, of which there are many - too many - lack tension, drama or pathos. I found myself watching dispassionately, only occasionally moved by the aesthetics of the film-making process, but uterly disconnected, even bored by, the action on the screen.

Equally offensively, the film is overtly homophobic, as if somehow needing to offset the director's vision of Spartans as muscular underwear catalogue models in red cloaks and leather codpieces designed to show off their oiled pecs and washboard stomachs. One example of this comes when the Spartans dismiss Athenians as "poets and boy lovers". The most extreme example of homophobia in 300 is in the depiction of the film's villain, the Persian god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) who is presented as the classic Hollywood evil fag, with plucked eyebrows, long nails, a lascivious voice and exaggerated, effeminate posture.

Xerxes' unnatural overtures are rebuffed - and rightly so, cry a thousand sweaty, insecure teenage jocks - by the Spartan king Leonidas (Gerard Butler), a manly man's man who surrounds himself with half-naked men in an unwittingly precise illustration of the struggle between homosocial and homoerotic urges that dominates the Western masculine millieu.

Perhaps the only highlight in the entire two-hour movie is a scene in which Leonidas' queen, played by Lena Headey, gains the upper hand over a supercillious, treacherous Spartan politician. Sadly it comes so late in the film, as the coda of a poorly developed subplot, that it failed to arouse the appropriate thrill in the by-now bored and intellectually brutalised audience at last night's midnight preview at the IMAX Theatre.

In short, 300 is an abominable film that offends the intelligence of its viewers, that betrays the historical canon it purports to celebrate, that butchers any concept of drama, and whose politics and social messages are deeply suspect. It even fails to be so bad it's good. It's just bad, boring, and uterly undeserving of popular or critical acclaim.