The Road to Sparta is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. The film is predominantly about running, and it will hardly come as a surprise that lots of people out there don’t give a tinker’s cuss about any kind of sport, let alone running. It tires them out. They just don’t want to watch.
On the other hand, the film veers away from being a pure sports documentary by angling the lens onto ancient Greek history, the run that Pheidippides made from Athens to Sparta in 490 BC to try and rustle up reinforcements to take on the mighty Persians. Herodotus documents the run in his Histories so it must be true.