Fam, you know I love me some action movies. But we gottta talk about these long-ass runtimes!
I love action movies so much, I put the word “action” in the genre description for my urban fantasy novels, for Batman’s sake!
I grew up on James Bond and have come to love his descendants, Mission: Impossible, the Bourne movies, John Wick, and others.
But, fam, no action movie needs to be over two hours long. Most 1980s classics (Lethal Weapon, Commando) were well under that mark. Hell, First Blood with Sylvester Stallone was an hour and a half!
I may give you an extra fifteen minutes, but after two and a half hours, you’re pushing your welcome.
Final Reckoning, the eighth (and final?) Mission: Impossible movie, clocks in at two hours and forty-nine minutes. That’s seven minutes longer than Dead Reckoning, the last entry in the franchise, which also felt bloated (looking at you, train wreck scene and chase in Rome).
And they did Rebecca Ferguson dirty, but I digress.
That runtime ties Tom Cruise’s last M:I stunt spectacular with John Wick 4, another movie bloated by stunts.
I think I’m seeing a trend here.
I appreciate the stunt work, I do. It’s about time that America caught up to the exemplary stuff that came out of Hong Kong back in the late eighties and early nineties.
Plus, I get that if you wanna get butts in the movie theater seats, you gotta give them something they’re not gonna see on TV — and that’s budget-bloating stunts.
But unless they’re gonna start making action movies epic character studies like Heat, I need y’all to save some of these stunts for the sequels (or other original movies).
The Wick movies left that character arc thing after the first movie, which is why the subsequent films, though enjoyable, were more like watching a Twitch gamer play Call of Duty than a story.
With the exception of the Bourne trilogy (there are not two more sequels and I will be very MAGA Trump won 2020 on that), today’s long action movie runtimes have become shoot-em-up/ blow-em-up movies all about the action with very little in the way of character arc or having anything to say about current events or life in general.
If you’re not giving me that, at least give me my two hours so a brutha can get to the bathroom!
Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning hits theaters today!
Bring your catheters.
