Actors: Lena Headey,
Rodrigo Santoro, David Wenham, Andrew Tiernan, Andrew Pleavin, Sullivan
Stapleton, Eva Green, Hans Matheson, Callan Mulvey, Jack O'Connell
Rating: 8 out of 10, Everything
you think it would be – heads flying off, bodices ripped open, and sexual
encounters in the middle of battle – all so highly “realistic”. It picks up the story directly adjacent to
and after the battle of Thermopylae as Xerxes descends on Greece and focuses on
the Athenians this time instead of the Spartans. It was cool to see Strikeback’s SGT Damien
Scott (Sullivan Stapleton) playing Themistocles – he looks to have a bright
future as he was completely at home on the big screen. The filmmakers went in a different direction
this time trying to woo female viewers (guys were a sure bet). In the first movie it was lingering shots of
male abdominal six packs that were almost homo-erotic. They abandoned that for some kick ass female
characters that were stabbing and decapitating along with their male
counterparts. Eva Green plays the
villain and is carving out a real niche as a spookily evil temptress “type” (I
was going to but didn’t use the b-word – daughter’s influence again). This movie was all about making the blood
spurts as dramatic as possible (3D, don’t you know) and frantically maintaining
a bare fingernail hold on the real history of the events. It was a lot of harmless fun (except if you
were in the Persian navy at Salamis) if not taken too seriously; exactly what I
expected and I loved it.
MVP: Stapleton showing
some real screen presence as Themistocles
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