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Never mind about historical accuracy - when the guy with swords for hands came on, the cinema audience laughed, it was so farcical. Really, even from a plain old storytelling viewpoint, casting the villains all as either disabled, diseased, monsters, hermaphrodites, fat ugly men with monobrows or just generally wholly repulsive people is just ineffective since it denigrates the Spartan achievements. The Persians in that film were consistently either subhuman or faceless, or both - such as when an Immortal gets his mask ripped off.
And even if you don't have historical knowledge of Spartan society, their constant preaching about freedom, justice and democracy seriously jars with the brutality of their treatment of their own children, as well as disrupts the pacing of the film with long, boring speeches.
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