“300” was an incredibly stylish and incredibly stupid movie.

 It looked cool at the time and had some fun action sequences, but there wasn’t much beyond that. Its target audience was teenage boys with a thirst for testosterone-fueled violence, but those people are now seven years older and seven years wiser.

However, even though the original film had a satisfying ending and is now old enough to be in second grade, someone decided there should be a sequel. With “300: Rise of an Empire,” fans of the original will have their senses and intelligence assaulted by a movie that is so thoroughly dumb that it’s a chore to sit through.

For the uninformed, the original film was a comic book adaptation about Leonidas, king of Sparta, leading a force of 300 soldiers against a much larger, invading Persian army led by King Xerxes. It was a simple, but effective excuse for Gerard Butler to stab and slash at scores of soldiers.

This new film can’t even be called a sequel because the entire thing (save for the last 20 minutes or so) takes place at the same time, with a shift in focus to the naval front of the war between Greece and Persia. The action pits Athenian naval commander Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton) against his evil Persian counterpart Artemisia (Eva Green). The two try to outduel each other in a match of nautical wits, leading to a bunch of boring action scenes and the most unnecessarily long and uncomfortable sex scene in recent memory.

“300: Rise of an Empire” is the cinematic equivalent of professional wrestling, in that most of it revolves around a cast of indistinguishable shirtless men fighting each other and occasionally spitting out terrible dialogue. The only difference is wrestling is sometimes funny and interesting. The story is told in such a disjointed manner it can be difficult to discern what exactly the characters are trying to accomplish at any given moment.

The action scenes are ridiculously violent, with every slash leading to a ludicrous amount of blood spraying all around the frame. However, aside from somewhat interesting fight choreography, there’s nothing especially noteworthy about the action. All of it is framed in an obnoxious art style that may have been neat in 2007, but just looks off now. It’s way too obvious that every outdoor scene was shot in front of a green screen.

Green’s performance as Artemisia is the only redeeming aspect of the film. Her character is so comically evil that it’s sometimes funny, though probably unintentionally. The best part of the movie is when she decapitates a Greek soldier, kisses his dead face, and then throws his head off her ship. If the movie was full of ridiculous moments like that, it might have been all right.

“300: Rise of an Empire” is just garbage. Besides some fun moments with Green’s character, there is absolutely nothing to recommend about this movie. The dialogue is awful, the action is dull, and the story is pointless. The most offensive thing, by far, is that the ending seems to suggest that even more of this trash could be dumped into theaters in the future. Hopefully there will be better movies out seven years from now.