Why I Didn't See The Departed

I respect Martin Scorsese immensely as a filmmaker. He is very talented and has created some of the best movies ever made. His new movie The Departed opened yesterday and I was interested and excited to see it until I looked in the newspaper and saw......'Running Time: 2 hours 38 minutes.'

Ugh.

There are certain movies that can run over 2.5 hours and I'll stick with them, North By Northwest, 2001:A Space Odyssey, heck I enjoyed every minute of 'Seven Samurai's 3.5 hours, but I can't help but wonder if this movie needs to be so long. I need only look back to his last film, 2004's The Aviator. That was a great movie, but after 2 hours 48 minutes, I thought it couldn't have benefited from losing 20-30 minutes. Action/Adventure movies can run long because they have big, long action sequences that make the time go by quickly and things like that, but a cop/mob movie like this, I don't know, it just seems a smidge too long. Goodfellas was 2 hours 20 minutes and that is about as long as it should be. The Godfather is a 3 hour mob movie, but Coppola's original cut was around 2 hours, and the studio told him they wanted an sweeping, operatic epic, not an above average mob movie (talk about getting what you ask for). Anyway, point is, that movie is 3 hours, but it is so good you (or at least I) would stick with it for 4 hours (and 2 sequels). The Departed, however, does not strike me as an epic.

In his old age Marty seems to have gotten a wee bit over-indulgent in his craft. Then again, I could be wrong, this movie could be like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and fly right on by, but I doubt it.

I'll go see, in spite of that seemingly incessant length, because it has Jack Nicholson (as a bad guy), Leo, Marty Sheen, and Scorsese is a great director and then I'll come back and give report.