I have no doubt that catching the ouchy end of a spear with your abdomen can be disquieting, or that it may be unpleasant to be thrown into the drink as your flaming ship is reduced to toothpicks. In “300: Rise of an Empire,” though, all of this looks like a jolly good time, which is why the film works as a high-tech boy-fantasy successor to “Conan the Barbarian.”
Taking place concurrently with “300,” in which Spartans broke off from other Greeks to get massacred by Persians, this one finds the Persian navy being led by the deliciously diabolical Artemesia (Eva Green). She’s an ethnic Greek who, having been kidnapped and raped in battle, was raised by Persians to become a sword-wielding warrior, and rose to become the power behind the throne of Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro).
Her opposite number, in a loincloth and blue cape, is Themistokles, the Greek freedom fighter who seeks to unite the various democratic states into one great anti-Persian fighting machine but is rebuffed by the surviving Spartan queen (Lena Headey). Sparta seems kind of like Texas: You wouldn’t want to fight a war without them, but they’d want to run everything their way and probably make you listen to country music, in which case maybe you’d rather just go ahead and die a beautiful death.
Green rules the picture with her nutty stare and her willingness to get nasty in a hot sex scene, but the movie’s main weak point is the Greek general Themistokles.
He’s played by Sullivan Stapleton, a man not fit to wash Gerard Butler’s loincloth (just as Butler isn’t fit to carry Russell Crowe’s). With his pretty-boy eyes, he seems like the kind of guy you’d meet at the salad bar wearing a fisherman’s sweater. The lunatic blood lust you need in a mythic war hero isn’t there, nor in the eyes of any of his interchangeable brothers in arms.
Out-performing them all is the blood, thick as 10W-40, spewing in globs and blasts. It isn’t remotely disturbing, because it’s so stylized and comic book-ish. The gore in the PG-13 “Son of God,” which was meant to hurt and did, was far more disturbing. In “300: Rise of an Empire,” snicking the head off an underperforming officer in your navy seems like no more than routine disciplinary action. Tough love. Like Lou Gossett Jr. making Richard Gere do push-ups in the rain. Going to the trouble of cleaving a friend’s neck in twain is just another way of showing you care.
All those limb-choppings and neck-severings accompany half a dozen boffo action set pieces. For instance: Guy in flames falls through a jet of oil which he turns into a massive blowtorch. Wreckage, men and arms all fall into the sea and turn it into a giant churning chowder of despair. Then: sea monsters.
OK, there isn’t a lot of seriousness here, and the relentless attempts to coin a new battle-cry catchphrase do approach self-parody. But why fight it? This isn’t Sparta. This . . . is . . . Hollywood!