I would happily pay a nickel less, in quarters or arcade tokens, for a vigorous 10-minute session with the video game that “300” aspires to become. Later she observes that “freedom is not free.”Īnother movie - Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s “Team America,” whose wooden puppets were more compelling actors than most of the cast of “300” - calculated the cost at $1.05. “Come home with your shield or on it,” she tells him as he heads off into battle after a night of somber marital whoopee. Gorgo understands her husband’s noble purpose, the higher cause for which he is willing to sacrifice his life. Too cowardly to challenge Leonidas man to man, he fixes his attention on Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey), a loyal wife and Spartan patriot who fights the good fight on the home front. And the local council is full of appeasers and traitors, chief among them a sardonic, shifty-eyed smoothy named Theron (Dominic West, known to fans of “The Wire” as the irrepressible McNulty). A gaggle of sickly, corrupt priests, bought off by the Persians, consult an oracular exotic dancer whose topless gyrations lead to a warning against going to war. (It may be worth pointing out that unlike their mostly black and brown foes, the Spartans and their fellow Greeks are white.)īut not all the Spartans back in Sparta support their king on his mission. They also hew to a warrior ethic of valor and freedom that makes them, despite their gleeful appetite for killing, the good guys in this tale. The Persians, pioneers in the art of facial piercing, have vastly greater numbers - including ninjas, dervishes, elephants, a charging rhino and an angry bald giant - but the Spartans clearly have superior health clubs and electrolysis facilities. Hot Gates, indeed! Devotees of the pectoral, deltoid and other fine muscle groups will find much to savor as King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) leads 300 prime Spartan porterhouses into battle against Persian forces commanded by Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), a decadent self-proclaimed deity who wants, as all good movie villains do, to rule the world. It’s all about the ancient Battle of Thermopylae, which unfolded at a narrow pass on the coast of Greece whose name translates as Hot Gates. Adapted from a graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, it offers up a bombastic spectacle of honor and betrayal, rendered in images that might have been airbrushed onto a customized van sometime in the late 1970s. “300” is about as violent as “Apocalypto” and twice as stupid.
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