300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE

 Reviewed by Patrick Gibbs

GRADE:F
Sullivan Stapelton, Eva Green, Lena Headey, Hans Matheson, Rodrigo Santoro, Callan Mulvey, Jack O'Connel and David Wenham
Screenplay by Zack Snyder and Kurt Johnstad
Directed by Noam Murro

Let's be honest. 300 was not a great film. But it was a good movie.

Director Zack Snyder's adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel about the battle of Thermopylale was a triumph of style over substance, with a breathtaking visual style that perfectly captured Miller's comic. It was also the oddest mixture of virulent, ultra right wing ideology and homoeroticism ever put on film.

This mash up between the sword and sandal epic, Robert Roriguez' Sin City and the Joel Schumacher Batman movies was a solid guilty pleasure. The lead performances by Gerard Butler and Lena Headey were campy but sincere, and the movie was dumb fun, and even occasionally veered into moments of genuine emotion.  Naturally, a movie that sets the box office on fire the way this did, launches a big career for its director, and was so heavily emulated, is going to spawn a sequel. The problem? The title characters were all killed. All of them. All 300 of them.

Frank Miller went to work on a new graphic novel entitled Xerxes, which was to tell the back story of the movie's villain, the "God King" of Persia. This was a problematic idea, and the book was never published. But this didn't deter the studio, who wanted to press ahead with the film. So Zack Snyder and Kurt Johnstad, the duo that wrote the first film, got to work on adapting it into a workable and coherent script. After seeing the film, I can only conclude that they haven't finished yet.

This movie takes place before, during and after the original film. It's pre-mid-sequel!  Themistokles of Athens (Sullivan Stapelton) killed the Perisan king in battle many years ago, but it has haunted him for years that he did not kill the king's son Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) instead. Xerxes has since become a force to be reckoned with, and together with Artemisia of Caria (Eva Green), a sexy warrior General with a chip on her shoulder, Xerxes is getting ready to lay waste to all of Greece.  Themistokles wishes to unite all of Greece into one empire, but cannot gain support for the idea. Meanwhile, King Leonidas of Sparta heads off with his brave 300 to face Xerxes alone, and Themistokles realizes that this brave but doomed stand against Xerxes may be just the catalyst that he is looking for to rally the people together.

The movie is a disjointed mess that has no sense of flow, and Sullivan Stapelton is quite possibly the blandest leading man to hit the big screen since George Lazenby, or at least Miles O'Keefe.  He has no star presence or charisma whatsoever, and barely seems to care about what's going on. The only time he doesn't look bored is during the shockingly graphic sex/fight scene between Temistokles and Artemesia. Eva Green fares better, with a scenery chewing but entertaining performance as the villainess, and she is clearly the main selling  point that the studio is latching onto, focusing more on her sex appeal than her acting ability. In fact, perhaps a more apt title for this film would have been 300: A Sale Of Two Titties.

The violence, though stylized and cheesy, is appallingly graphic, with constant geysers of blood and decapitated heads being thrown at the camera in glorious 3D to distract from the lack of story flow and the painfully bad dialogue. some of the naval battle sequences are admittedly spectacular, but by that point in the film you've had to sit through so much exposition and tedium that it's hard to care, and the only character that all of this back story has managed to build up any sympathy for is Artemisa.

The film works neither as entertainment or art, and frankly it ranks well below at least half of the films on my ten worst list for 2013.

300: Rise Of An Empire is rated R for violence, gore, graphic sex, nudity,  profanity and vulgarity, and in my opinion should have been an NC17, at least when shown in 3D.