Finally got around to watching this movie a couple nights ago and I found it rather disappointing. You see most of the "good stuff" in the trailer, so the movie itself feels like nothing more than an extended version of the trailer.

My biggest complaint regarding this movie, by far, is the incredibly annoying and pointless voiceover narration. At one point we see the Spartans laughing about something, except King Leonidas. The narration then tells us how all the Spartans laughed but not the King. Fuck, no shit, I could have sworn I saw that just now with my own two fucking eyes. About 99.99% of the narration is of this kind of useless, obnoxious chatter. I wish they would release a version where the narration is removed, or at least gave you the option to turn it off.

But this film has many more flaws. A lot of the CGI is, well, bad. Most of the acting is pretty atrocious. Except for Gerard Butler as the King, he's pretty cool. The entire storyline with the Queen could have been jettisoned, it added nothing to the story. The soundtrack is all over the place, one minute rock metal, next an orchestra piece. The King tells the hunchback he can't fight for Sparta because he won't be able to stay in formation with the other soldiers. Yet, when we see the Spartans fight, they are out of formation more often than not. There's a lot of shit in this movie that was blatantly ripped off from Gladiator. Did I mention the dialogue? Brutal, embarrassingly bad, I cringed every time somebody opened their mouth to speak. Their spears pierced the enemies way too easily, plus they pulled them right back out again, effortlessly. There's this one scene where a Spartan is fighting a horde of Persians and what does he do? He throws his sword away! That was just stupid. There's supposed to be 300 Spartans in battle, yet we only see maybe 10 or 20 at any one time. The battles were fairly well choreographed, although the Persians were generally just cannon fodder, almost never putting up much of a fight. And the battles themselves were a little too obviously just actors working against a green screen.

What was good about this movie? Well, they were quite liberal with the bloodletting, which I quite liked. I was never a fan of the antiseptic carnage we get in most movies nowadays. They had a handful of cool one-liners - "This is SPARTA!" "Tonight, we dine in HELL!" "Then we'll fight in the shade!" Er, I guess that's about it. I suppose if you go in with very low expectations you might find this flick moderately entertaining, but I was expecting considerably more and was quite disappointed.