If a film manages to tell an old story in an appreciably new visual way, that's not nothing. By that measure "300" succeeds. It's a fairly entertaining bloodbath designed to put audiences ringside in the cage match of the 5th Century B.C., as the Spartans square off against the Persians. It's the few against the many, and the few are mighty fit. The movie should've been called "Ode to a Grecian Ab."

Zack Snyder directs, from a script he wrote with Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon. The director made his feature film debut with the peppy 2004 remake of "Dawn of the Dead." Having dealt nicely with the graphic, Snyder now enters the territory of the graphic novel: The script adapts the 1998 book by Frank Miller and colorist Lynn Varley. Miller is best known for his "Dark Knight" books and the "Sin City" tales of sadistic woe, and the look of "300"-copper-toned, shadowy closeups and a conspicuously bleached-out palette-is, like the "Sin City" film version, very close to its source.

This is a mixed blessing. For a story replete with open-air combat "300" is strangely claustrophobic. And for a film with lotsa flesh and even more blood, it's light on flesh-and-blood characters. I realize most people don't go to action movies for nuanced character development (that's what YouTube is for), but beyond the Spartan king and queen and Xerxes, the Persian interloper most likely to confirm the administration's suspicions about that part of the world, you can't tell the skull-crackers without a scorecard in "300."

The screenplay doesn't expand the graphic novel's skeletal narrative so much as replicate it, dutifully. In flashback we see young Leonidas, preteen Spartan-in-training, testing "his wits and will against Nature's fury." He survives howling winds, an attack of a demon-eyed wolf and a torrent of digitized snow to become King Leonidas. Life is good with Queen Gorgo and the gang until an emissary for Xerxes arrives in Sparta, demanding fealty and subservience. The meeting does not go well for the spokesman, and the rest of the picture depicts the Battle of Thermopylae and the various ways a Spartan can kill a foe and keep on killing.

In Miller's book, which is beautiful when it's angry, the sound of a Spartan blade entering the body of an enemy is signified by the word KUNCH, followed by a cry of "gyaa" or just plain "gaa." In the film these things are left to the sound designer. Snyder and cinematographer Larry Fong add their own flourishes to make up for the loss of the KUNCHes. In a souped-up variation on any number of NFL promo spots, every time a Spartan goes in for the kill, the motion becomes inhumanly fast; then, at the moment of beheading or arm-hacking, the film shifts suddenly into slow-mo, as syrupy-looking blood globules float around for your viewing pleasure.

Some of this works as pure, blood-soaked eye candy. Snyder has talent, and in certain shots taken directly from Miller's book-notably the silhouetted bit wherein the Spartans force the enemy fighters off a cliff to their doom-you're getting comic book imagery that happens also to be cinematically viable. The actors don't have a chance against any of it. Gerard Butler, lately of "The Phantom of the Opera," plays Leonidas in stolid 1962 Steve "Hercules" Reeves fashion, struggling to fill his own dramatic pauses. Also, Butler apparently stole Sig Ruman's beard from "A Night at the Opera," and it's hard to invest fully in a Spartan king when you're waiting for one of his subjects to crack, "Don't point that thing at me, it might go off."

I saw "300" with a big crowd ready to rumble, and while they may well have gotten what they wanted from it, the only audible response came when Lena Headey's Queen Gorgo exacted revenge on a particularly odious politico. The film periodically grinds to a halt whenever the actors, including good ones such as Headey, are required to deliver that quaint old standby, dialogue.

In the main the Spartans are a rather dully invincible lot, at least until the final reel. For contrast's sake Xerxes (Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro) seems to have been guest-directed by Mel Gibson, so sniveling is he in his decadence. His silver eye shadow alone is enough to make a Tin Man weep, and if Frank Miller happens to be looking for his next graphic novel supervillain, he could do worse than the obvious: The Silver Eye Shadow.