Listen up, wussies. Unless your boss’ version of “Good morning” is “Ready your breakfast and eat hearty—for tonight, we dine in hell!” I don’t want to hear about your grueling day at the office. For I have seen 300, a glutton’s helping of visuals about Sparta’s final stand, and I now understand that the good fight requires balls. (These soldiers are so tough they go to battle wearing only boots, helmets, and leather tightie-reddies.) Writer-director Zack Snyder’s apparent first step in adapting Frank Miller’s graphic novel was kneeling at its feet, just as Robert Rodriguez did with another Miller adaptation, 2005’s extraordinary Sin City. Like that movie, 300 is notable not only for its faithful reproduction of the panels of the graphic novel but also for its inventive look: Intensifying the book’s color scheme of khaki, burgundy, gray, and black, 300 looks like life turned into a comic instead of a comic brought to life. The shadowy CGI technique, and its results, are interesting for sure; unfortunately, the same can’t be said of the movie as a whole. The story recalls the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., in which an army of 300 Spartans valiantly—if foolishly—fight the substantially larger Persian forces as they advance into Greece. Snyder (who also directed 2004’s Dawn of the Dead) and co-scripters Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon have Sparta’s king, Leonidas (Gerard Butler), rouse his men with blowhardiness and bombastic lines, such as that announcement of the group’s dinner plans. A handful of the skirmishes, particularly the black-bloodied, decapitation-happy ones, are relatively exciting, and visuals such as a treelike formation of corpses or the ridiculously ripped men are as impressive as the palette. All this bellowing and testosterone gets old fast, though—especially since there’s not much of a plot outside of the combat scenes, and the not-much-of-a-plot scenes are laden with dialogue worthy of Anakin and Padmé. (That’s about as bad as you can get, by the way.) Ultimately, it turns out that a running time of close to two hours is a heavy weight for visuals alone to carry. So buy some popcorn and eat hearty, ’cause you might get bored as hell.