22 July Review: 5 Ups & 4 Downs

Downs...

4. The Poor Pacing & Excessive Run-Time

By far the most obvious problem with the movie is that it's incredibly sprawling and unfocused, attempting to cover too much of the massacre's events and the resulting fallout.

With a brutal 144 minute run-time, the movie features the lead-up to the attacks, the attacks themselves in surprisingly brief detail, and then almost two hours of character drama jumping from the survivors to politicians and also Breivik himself.

Greengrass has clearly tried to create a broadly wide-reaching drama but has ultimately spread himself far too thin, covering a lot but most of it with little depth.

Though the director clearly didn't have a studio breathing down his neck to keep his drama to a reasonable length, he and editor William Goldenberg desperately needed to shave the length down and cut the excess fat.