300 Reviews
Top Critic300 has one-dimensional caricatures who talk like professional wrestlers plugging their next feud.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
A muscle-magazine fantasy crossed with a video game and an Army recruiting film.
300 was as pathetically puerile as I had expected.
It might have been one of the great all-time mad, bad movies but for one thing - it's just sooo boring.
As to this pumped-up spectacle's other aims, it's anybody's guess: selling gladiatorial chest-beating as beefcake erotica? Combining a movie and its own video-game spin-off into one package? Being both a dessert topping and a floor wax?
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
The kids just want to have fun. Many of them will. But what does that say about another Greek contribution -- Western civilization?
If the movie's neocon message is as thin as a politician's excuse, that's to be expected. But what's surprising here is that the sights are just as meagre.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
History is inconveniently complex. And so we get Frank Miller's version, in which everything is simplified to the point of porridge.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Keeping in mind Slate's Mickey Kaus' Hitler Rule -- never compare anything to Hitler -- it isn't a stretch to imagine Adolf's boys at a 300 screening, heil-fiving each other throughout and then lining up to see it again.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Watching 300, there's the arresting sense of eavesdropping on another time.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It's impossible not to be moved by its nearly nonstop visual assault.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It's most definitely a Spartan movie, yet it's really all about wretched excess.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Does the film stay faithful to the Miller and Varley's vision? Indeed it does -- to a kunch!
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
For once, the Larry King quote machines who supply the advance blurbs to the studio for their marketing campaigns will be correct.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Snyder gives his movie the encompassing look and feel of a graphic novel. Perhaps because he shot the actors in front of digitally concocted backgrounds, Snyder is able to sustain an otherworldly quality that perfectly suits the movie's lurid material.
| Original Score: B
[Gerard Butler's character] charisma is elusive. He vigorously enunciates like a summer stock player doing Shakespeare. But the writing's overblown. And locating the requisite sorrow in this tale of heroism is an afterthought for Snyder and co.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
It is excessively, cheerfully violent -- and it is gorgeous to behold. It looks like the world's most sophisticated and expensive video game, and I mean that in a good way.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
300, even with its impressive vistas of computer-generated soldiers, is just a throwaway epic.
300 is about as subtle as a spear through the head. But it's also shamelessly entertaining, and not a bad way to make time move a little faster.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
300 is about as violent as Apocalypto and twice as stupid.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/5
It also pits millions of fans of brainless violence against a gallant band, or so I choose to think of us, who still expect movies to contain detectable traces of humanity.
A mythic ode to righteous bellicosity. In at least one way, the film is true to the ethos of ancient Greece: It conflates moral excellence and physical beauty (which, in this movie, means being young, white, male, and fresh from the gyms of Brentwood).
300 is one breathtaking digi-tableau after another. But the dialogue is a joke, the performances have more to do with bodybuilding than character, and the lesson that the film imparts isn't anything to do with courage and military skill.
| Original Score: 2/4
Unless you like human shish kabob, don't spring forward. Fall back.
Snyder's 300 certainly has its share of the latest toys, but they make for a better coming-attractions trailer than a full-length theatrical film.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Just about everything in this pea-brained epic is overscaled and overwrought -- it's a cartoon trying to be a towering triptych. The dissonance between the film's heroic ambitions and its grindingly coarse treatment is rather amusing.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
It is undeniably exciting and awe-inspiring; but it also lacks a sense of tactile warmth, a crucial core of reality.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
There's a stale, synthetic airlessness about the movie. Imagine a large cast trapped in a series of spectacular screensavers. It could be ancient Greece. It could be somebody's hard drive.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
In creating the ultimate movie for sword-and-sandal blood-spatter fetishists, director Zack Snyder scores on the spectacle side -- 300 looks amazing -- but his mechanical story line and over-the-top melodramatics don't support the action.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
The disconnect between the human actors and the digital backgrounds is more pronounced here... Because classic Hollywood cinema is so rich with epic images of antiquity, this can't help but seem chintzy.
It's kind of a ghastly hoot, and while I suppose it does no harm, it also contributes nothing. It's a guilty unpleasantness.
The movie should've been called Ode to a Grecian Ab.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
300 is at its best when it settles for purely visceral thrills.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It is a wall-to-wall canvas of expressionist ultraviolence.
| Original Score: 4/4
A full-blooded, testosterone-spiked shot glass that you down in one ferocious sitting.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Put bluntly, the movie's just too darned silly to withstand any ideological theorizing. And 'silly' is invoked here, more or less, with affection.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Call 300 the New Age sword-and-sandal epic -- a Hercules movie for the computer age.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
300 is a movie blood-drunk on its own artful excess. Guys of all ages and sexes won't be able to resist it.
| Original Score: 3/4
Despite the fantastic visuals, action and sometimes rousing story, the needle flickers between grandiose and laughable -- in part because the film takes itself sooo relentlessly, slow-motion, music-swellin', see-you-in-hell seriously.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The battle sequences are filled with grotesque spectacle: They start off entertainingly ferocious, then grow numbing with stylized spraying blood and severed heads.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
300 may not offer masterful storytelling in a conventional sense, but it's hard to beat as a spectacle and that makes it worthwhile viewing for all but the most squeamish of potential audience members.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Frankly, it's the slavish, frame-by-frame devotion to Miller's source material that's the problem. That explains both the risible screenplay and why the movie, for all its liberation from the real world, never takes full-winged flight.
Snyder's depiction of the ancient Battle of Thermopylae, in which 300 Spartans fought off a much larger Persian army, is so over-the-top it's laughable -- so self-serious, it's hard to take seriously.
A blustery, bombastic, visually arresting account of the Battle of Thermopylae as channeled through the rabid imagination of graphic novelist Frank Miller.
Frank Miller's graphic novel about an ancient Greek battle comes to vivid life.
