'300' sequel fails to live up to the original

City Paper grade: C

If anyone has spent the last seven years wondering what was going on in the background of the original 300 while Gerard Butler and his band of impossibly buff Spartans were engaged in slo-mo slaughter, the answer has belatedly arrived. Turns out there was a naval B-team close by, also engaged in piercing, crushing, mangling and disassembling each other’s bodies in shimmering, gracefully choreographed mayhem. Noam Murro does a convincing Zack Snyder impression as director, creating an airless fetishization of balletic violence as garishly pretty as an airbrushed van. This time the endless battle arrives in 3-D, which allows for a lot of Rorschach blood spurts gushing from dismembered limbs, which often lends Rise of an Empire the feel of a lava lamp rather than a film. A Gallagher routine with chiseled abs in place of watermelons, it cries out for an actual arterial spray to douse the first few rows in a bloody splash zone. The original had novelty and the charisma of Butler on its side, before he squandered that potential on a string of dreary rom-coms. The sequel is redeemed only by Eva Green as the feral Artemisia, attacking the scenery with Spartan ferocity and once again understanding that over-the-top villainy is the only proper reaction to this kind of nonsense. Sullivan Stapleton is no match for her as the heroically toned Themistokles, though he does hold up his end of a ridiculously brutal sex scene that may be the most violent thing in the film.