Hollywood’s summer of the never-ending bomb
It baffles me why Hollywood insists on turning blockbusters into bladder-bursters. Are studios hoping we’ll buy more popcorn if we sit in our seats longer?
My three offspring tell me that I should include this boilerplate line in every movie review: “The film was at least 20 minutes too long.”
They’ve often heard me utter some variation of this complaint, after sitting through yet another movie where it seemed like the director was on an ego trip and/or the editor was on strike.
My kids have a point, but I’m going to ignore their wise counsel. If I got into boilerplate moaning, I’d also have to put in how I hate watching 3D through smudgy plastic lenses or sitting near selfish people who won’t stop lighting up their smartphones. And where would that get me?
But I am going to advance here a radical argument: One of the reasons why so many movies are bombing this summer is that they’re just too long. Moviegoers, critics included, are getting worn out — or scared away — by films that just don’t know when enough is enough.
There’s no hard and fast rule as to how long movies should be. Let me suggest, though, that a comedy reaches optimum hilarity in 90 minutes or less and a drama expends maximum blood, sweat and tears in under 110.
I’ve got nothing against long movies, if there’s a good reason for the length. I once sat through all eight hours and five minutes of Andy Warhol’s 1964 “provocation” Empire, a soundless, wordless, flickering black-and-white image of New York’s Empire State Building from dusk to dawn.
The screening at the Art Gallery of Ontario had at least one bathroom break; I also smuggled in a peanut butter sandwich and a can of Red Bull. I was mesmerized by Warhol’s radical vision.
“No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough,” Roger Ebert famously observed. Some of the biggest flops this summer, critically if not also at the box office, have ignored this sage advice. Some examples:
Transformers: The Last Knight runs an intolerable 149 minutes as it barrages viewers with the fifth and least edition of this mechanical-mayhem franchise. I actually consider The Last Knight one of the worst movies of all time; Bay’s editors should have hit the “delete” button right after the opening credits.
The Fate of the Furious, the eighth instalment of the relentless Fast & Furious franchise, runs out of gas long before it fully squanders its 136 minutes of running time. The ridiculous Wacky Races chase on a polar ice cap goes on forever.
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword lost my allegiance right off the top when giant circus elephants were seen battling in medieval England. Worst though, was the decision to have most of the 126 minutes drone on before Charlie Hunnam’s Arthur even realized he was a king.
Even the movies I’ve enjoyed this summer have been too long, which is where I quibble a bit with the late Ebert’s sensible maxim.
War for the Planet of the Apes gets its point across — apes good, humans bad — long before its 140minute conclusion.
Some judicious cutting would have improved the film and the chances of Andy Serkis getting an Oscar nomination for his mo-cap role as ape leader Caesar.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is great eye candy, but not much story, something that becomes abundantly evident over its 137-minute stretch. Writer/director Luc Besson puts in more digressions than plot.
Heist movie Baby Driver is technically a drama, I suppose, which makes its 112 minutes a mere two minutes past my arbitrary cut-off. But it’s really a comedy/musical, so a 90-minute runtime might have prompted writer/director Edgar Wright to trim the third act, which does go on.
Cinema history is full of brief classics. For comedy, there’s the first Toy Story (78 minutes), rock satire This Is Spinal Tap (87 minutes) and Walt Disney’s family classic Dumbo ( 64 minutes).
Examples of dramatic brevity include the intrigue of Rashomon (90 minutes), the western showdown of High Noon (90 minutes) and the horror of the original Frankenstein (69 minutes).
It frankly baffles me why Hollywood insists on turning blockbusters into bladder-bursters. Are studios, distributors and exhibitors hoping we’ll buy more popcorn, soda and Twizzlers if we sit in our seats longer?
But at least one Tinseltown titan seems to be getting the message. Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, currently No. 1 at the box office, runs a completely engaging 106 minutes in telling three separate narrative threads about the land/sea/air rescue of threatened soldiers from a French harbour during the Second World War.
Nolan’s previous film, the sci-fi epic Interstellar, ran a punishing 169 minutes, close to three hours. I pointed this out to him during an interview earlier this month. He agreed that Interstellar was a long sit, “certainly when I would come to do Q&As at the end of screenings at midnight!”
He took a different approach for Dunkirk, stripping away many of the usual narrative conceits and going in for intense action “where you just commit wholeheartedly to suspense and adrenalin and tumbling-forward motion.
“I call it a ‘snowballing of events,’ where things kind of roll into climax. And you can only sustain that type of intensity for so long, otherwise the audience just gets exhausted.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.