300 (Zack Snyder, 2006)

Good God, where to start? It's a thinly veiled Western civilisation vs. the dirty Asians (gooks, Arabs and anyone else you care to mention) parable. And also the most homoerotic film ever chucked out by a big studio in the name of manliness. In a very topsy-turvy view of history, the Spartans are a bunch of bodybuilders in little pants who are vastly outnumbered by a horde of assorted foreign weirdnesses. They shout a lot, everyone gets slaughtered in slo-mo CGI and the Americans get a victory of morale if not of morals. It's only history in the sense that mythical events live on to provide a back story for current crusades. Nothing here is more than stupid, and even the few lines of defiant statements that Gerard Butler is given to deliver to the cartoonish baddies are puerile farts compared to the Braveheart standard that Snyder probably imagined he was hitting.

3/10