10 Recent Movies So Good You Overlook Huge Flaws
9. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning - It's Way Too Long
As you'd expect from a Mission: Impossible sequel, Dead Reckoning is a superb action film with mesmerizing spectacle and an absolute mastery of suspense. Having said that, it definitely didn't need to be almost three hours long!
The past few Mission: Impossible offerings have been over two hours long, and they justified it. These are long, complicated action films with loads of moving parts, so a beefy length is hardly unreasonable. There is, however, a line, and Dead Reckoning crossed it a bit.
Dead Reckoning runs at 163 minutes, which felt excessive. This was especially true since, as good as the film still is, it doesn't quite offer the amazing action highs of the three sequels that preceded it.
This mammoth run-time was possibly one of the reasons the picture didn't do as well at the box office as was initially expected (although competition with Barbenheimer didn't help either). They could've shaved at least 20 minutes, maybe even half an hour, off the runtime and it would've made the film leaner and better-paced.
Hopefully the upcoming Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, which is apparently designed as a farewell to Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), will keep things a tad shorter.