Mortal Engines Review: 3 Ups & 7 Downs

2. It's Way Too Long & Brutally Paced

Though 128 minutes is far from an unreasonable run-time for a franchise-starting blockbuster movie, Mortal Engines really does make you feel its length, in large part due to the sheer excessiveness of the project.

With its overabundance of characters complete with their own backstories, alongside half-baked subplots and various strands of lore desperately pulled together, the film is quite the slog to get through.

By the time the end credits rolled, this critic felt exhausted rather than exhilarated by the empty bombast of it all.

Clearly the film could be immediately improved by cutting most of the perfunctory exposition and simply tightening the pace up to a more manageable 110-or-so minutes.

As it stands, the pacing is self-indulgent despite 2-ish hours seemingly fairly reasonable for a movie of this type.