I don't think I have ever seen a more unintimidating bunch. The Spartans were historically joined by Thespians, and frankly they are all Thespians in spirit. The biggest laugh comes when Leonidas, while striding purposefully around in his dun-coloured pants, gruffly denounces the culture of Athens as 'poets and boy-lovers!' Oh Leonidas! Do you really want to go there, your Majesty? Do you really want to poke the lid of that worm-filled can with your great big Spartan spear? I had a feeling that, whatever the historical reality of the Spartans' sexual conventions, the Spartan armourer here should have been working overtime running up the 300 handbags necessary for the kind of martial contest for which this vast platoon of gym-bunnies is most obviously fitted. Like the other 299 warriors, he models an unattractive pair of trunks, looking like no one so much as the legendary 1970s English wrestler Mick McManus, although Mick never had those twin slabs of pecs and the kind of ripped abs that come from 1,000 crunches a day - or at any rate a fair bit of digital tweaking in post-production. He's even shown in a rippling cornfield with his lady wife, like the great Gladiator of old. It's the Spartan King, Leonidas, who is played by a Brit: the grizzled, masculine, shouty figure of Gerard Butler, like a poor man's Russell Crowe. As it is, their leader, King Xerxes, is semi-nude (like everyone else) with loads of ethnic-looking body jewellery and he is played by pert Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro, last seen almost getting off with Laura Linney in Love, Actually and almost getting off with Nicole Kidman in Baz Luhrmann's multimillion dollar Chanel ad.

The Persians aren't made to look that bad. These people will presumably now redouble their commitment to historical sensitivity with another Holocaust Denial Conference.ДЄnd anyway, please. Iranian commentators, sudden and quick in quarrel, have found the slight intolerable.

With the kind of tremulous fervour that only prepubescent boys can work up on the subject of war, it recounts how the barbarous invading hordes of Persia were heroically held back by just 300 oiled and muscly Spartan warriors long enough for the Greek armies to regroup and for Athenian democracy - and by implication, all our inherited western values - to be saved for ever more. T he political and media classes of Iran are reportedly up in arms about this fantastically silly retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480BC, co-produced by Frank Miller, author of the pulpy shocker Sin City, and also the graphic novel on which this movie is based.

2006 movie 300