Epic burnout.

• Author: Oliver, Charles

More power to film makers can be a pain in the butt to audiences.

Two hours into the Kevin Costner film Wyatt Earp, I wondered if it would ever end. Over an hour later, it did.

One of the most conspicuous trends in movies over the past three years has been the increasing number of very long films: Wyatt Earp, 181 minutes; Wolf, 125 minutes; Clear and Present Danger, 141 minutes; True Lies, 141 minutes; Renaissance Man, 129 minutes; Being Human, 125 minutes; and Color of Night, 121 minutes.

Going back over the past couple of years, we find other examples: The Bodyguard, 130 minutes; Malcolm X, 201 minutes; Scent of a Woman, 157 minutes; Chaplin, 144 minutes; Hoffa, 140 minutes; and Lorenzo's Oil, 135 minutes. There are many others. Todd McCarthy, a critic for the show business trade publication Variety, pointed out this trend three years ago. At that time, he noted, "Now, I automatically perk up upon learning that a film runs just 89 minutes." Today, a movie that short still stands out from the pack.

Most critics who have commented on this trend toward longer movies suggest that film makers today just don't know how to make a tightly focused movie. There's some validity to this argument, but the key factor behind bloated, lengthy films is the increasing economic power of the talent behind them.

When is a long movie too long? Traditionally, theaters have preferred a 90-minute running time. Anything more cuts down on their ability to clear out the theaters and clean up between screenings. Lengths much greater than 90 minutes force theaters to eliminate screenings. A 90-minute film can be shown six times on one full day of screenings. A three-hour film such as Wyatt Earp can be shown only three times on one screen on one working day.

But for the purposes of this article, I'll use a more elusive concept of length. Namely, a film is too long when it isn't tightly focused, when scenes could be cut, when it feels padded. As Harry Cohn, the longtime head of Columbia Pictures, once said, "When my butt begins to hurt, the movie is too long."

Judged by this criteria, Schindler's List was fine at 195 minutes. At 120 minutes, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York could have been seriously trimmed. And even at a mere 87 minutes North was way, way too long.

Now, in some of the instances we have mentioned, the length of the film was a deliberate decision. Wyatt Earp and Malcolm X were supposed to be epics. Yet their stories ultimately did not support the length...