Gladiator has a lot to answer for. True, we loved Russell Crowe as Maximus – Crowe being the only actor who is butch enough to look heroic while wearing a leather skirt. And Joaquin Phoenix as Commodus proved that a power-crazed, incestuously inclined, murderous tyrant could be, well, kind of hot, actually. Of course the plot was total bollocks, culminating in that fanciful scene in the arena where, after Commodus bites the dust, Rome opts for freedom and democracy (first-past-the-post or PR, we wonder?) rather than civil war, which is of course what really happened, as per. But heck, it was fun to watch.

Yet the success of this, the biggest, most epic epic since Ben Hur, inspired some appalling imitatations. There was Troy, of course, in which the hair and make-up department somehow succeeded in making Brad Pitt look like Posh Spice. And who could forget Alexander, in which Oliver Stone achieved the seemingly impossible twice over, by making the life story of Alexander the Great, conqueror of the known world, seem positively dull, and Colin Farrell look less than sexy.

We have no complaints though about 300, Zack Snyder's movie, out next week, which shows how 300 square-jawed, muscle-toned Spartan warriors, apparently wearing Speedos, heroically stopped the Persian hordes from invading Greece by holding the pass at Thermopylae, against the odds, under the bold leadership of Leonidas. (That's the Spartan king, of course, not the Belgian chocolate-maker, who probably wouldn't be much use in a fight.)

300 is very violent – but then Thermopylae was a battle. It's cartoonish, albeit in a very stylish way; for like Sin City, 300 was inspired by a graphic novel by Frank Miller (who in turn was inspired by an epic from the Fifties, the heyday of the Hollywood epic). And it's gripping, with proper actors to boot, including our very own Gerard Butler (as Leonidas) and Dominic West. And it's also, well, so darn manly that it ends up coming over all queer, albeit in an inflected, unspoken, entirely unconsummated kind of way. (Not like the Ancient Greeks, then, who weren't averse to a spot of homo-flavoured slap and tickle on the right occasion.)

Background

• 300

• 300 - Sunday Times review

• Cool hunter: Spartans

• Life in a Spartan Regime

• Immortal Combat - Interview with Gerald Butler

Thank Thermopylae for your Starbucks

On a low budget, with a cut-price cast and a graphic-novel script, 300 is a film that’s framing the future of the action movie

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

"This is the gayest-costumed mainstream movie in recent memory," declares Charles Gant, film editor of heat, what with those Spartans in Speedos being joined by another Greek tribe "who look like S&M leather masters, while the king of Persia is a 7ft piercing queen". Variety agrees, pointing out that "possibly nowhere outside of gay porn have so many broad shoulders, bulging biceps and ripped torsos been seen onscreen as in 300". Seldom has mayhem looked so seductive. As Leonidas himself puts it: "There's no room for softness, not in Sparta. There's only room for the strong and the hard." Laconic? Sounds like our kind of town.

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