300

15, 117mins

The latest instalment in Hollywood’s ongoing love affair with the graphic novelist Frank Miller, 300 is shaping up to be the first big hit movie of the year ($70 million taken in its opening weeking in America). And it’s not hard to see why. Glorious, unashamed trash, the film reels in its core audience of teenage boys with computer game plotting, nonstop action and an unexpectedly high tally of exposed breasts.

The stylised violence and ravishing visuals will appeal to martial arts aficionados, while fans of well-defined and liberally oiled male torsos will find a smorgasbord of delights on show here.

The only audience members who will go away disappointed are those who would have preferred that the film took its historical sources – and itself – a little more seriously. They are missing the point. The joy of this ludicrously over-the-top movie is to be found in its gleeful undercurrent of self-mockery.

Miller’s original book retells the story of the legendary Battle of Thermopylae of 480BC, in which King Leonidas and his 300 Spartan warriors fought to the death against the colossal Persian army led by self-proclaimed god-king Xerxes. The co-writ-er and director Zack Snyder bows to Miller’s vision rather than historical fact.

In much the same way that Robert Rodriguez brought Miller’s neon-lit urban underbelly to life in Sin City, Snyder shot most of the action in front of blue screens, manipulating the colour balance in postproduction and adding entire vistas, armies and ram-paging battle elephants by means of CGI special effects.

The look of the film is dazzling and distinctive – monochromatic panoramas are slashed with the crimson of the Spartans’ capes and the blood they spill. You find yourself pondering on the breathtaking loveliness of an image, only noticing a moment later that the stark calligraphy of a silhouette against the sky shows 30 unfortunate Persian soldiers plunging to a horrible death.

Leonidas is played with a lot of terrifying roaring by the Scottish actor Gerard Butler. His brilliant and equally warlike queen Gorgo is Lena Headey, who brings a beauty and dignity to a role that is very much an afterthought.

But the film, like the Spartans themselves, is all about the battle. The narrative is stripped bare – or at least down to its leather underpants and warrior sandals. This is a movie that makes no effort to conceal its homo-erotic subtext, or indeed the buffed bodies of its cast.

Snyder established himself as a competent action director with his first film, the enjoyable remake of Dawn of the Dead. But with 300 he makes his mark as a bravura visual stylist. He has a magpie’s compulsion to steal whatever catches his eye, from other Hollywood blockbusters to Goya’s Disasters of War. He introduces a team of masked ninjas, an attack rhino and a goat-headed man playing a lute, for no apparent reason other than it all looks cool.

But all the showy pyrotechnics come at a cost: most of the performances are just about adequate and some are very poor indeed – Rodrigo Santoro as Xerxes, the pierced and effete would-be ruler of the world, is rather ridiculous. Still, in this handsome pantomime, the performances are not what we are watching.

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