Well, maybe not an hour longer, but be honest: would you have been interested in this article if it’d been titled “Movies that Need to be Anywhere From Twenty to Sixty Minutes Longer, Depending on How Many Additional Scenes would Benefit the Movie”? Probably not.

From Dusk Till Dawn

From Dusk Till Dawn’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The flick is half gangster movie and half vampire movie: we get to know Seth and Richie Gecko, along with their hostages, for a good hour or so before they are abruptly and unexpectedly dropped into a grindhouse horror shootemup. It’s an unexpected and entertaining direction for the film to take, but at the same time, the vampire section seems to end far too soon.

The vampire sequence starts wonderfully. The gorgeous, topless women of the Titty Twister Bar suddenly turn into blood-sucking demons as our “heroes” are forced to use pool cues, table legs, and pencils (any wooden stabbing weapon will kill a vampire, which begs the question – if the vampires are running a bar and they know that they can be killed by wood, why would they allow any wood furniture in the bar in the first place?) to defend themselves. Seeing the previously-realistic characters thrust into an unabashedly over-the-top situation is gratifying on many levels, which makes it all the more disappointing that the movie seems to end almost immediately after it begins.

Since the vampire shit starts up at the film’s midpoint, we only get half a vampire movie: it’s one gory 50 minutes of film, but it definitely feels rushed and certain interesting characters (Richie Gecko especially) die far too early, before they really get a chance to do anything. Before you know it, the vampires have come and gone; extending the action at the Titty Twister by another 30 minutes or so might have made for a much more gratifying film.

X-Men: The Last Stand

I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t really dig the first two X-Men films that much. They were too slow for my tastes, the characters were uninteresting, and by part 2, the entire franchise had really turned into ‘The Wolverine Show, Also Featuring The X-Men’. That being said, it’s truly amazing how one comes to appreciate the Singer-directed films once Brett Ratner took the directorial helm and essentially screwed everything up.

The Last Stand is a decently entertaining popcorn movie, but there is literally zero character development. Cyclops is killed five minutes in, making it impossible for him to interact in the potentially-fascinating love triangle between he, Wolverine, and the resurrected Jean Grey/Phoenix. Character subplots are started, and then disappear entirely: the Kitty Pryde/Iceman/Rogue love triangle goes absolutely nowhere, Beast spends all of three seconds deliberating over whether his loyalties lie with his government or his race, and the Angel character only exists because he looks cool on marketing posters.

Another hour wouldn’t have fixed all of these problems, but it would certainly add some much-needed substance to the film’s characters, which would, in the end, make the final battle that much more satisfying: as it stands, the last fight is nowhere near as epic as it looks in the trailer, partially because the audience doesn’t give two shits about most of the characters. Granted, the audience also doesn’t care because the final fight is poorly filmed, to the point where it possesses no sense of urgency or spectacle whatsoever, but I digress. What mattered most to the first two X-Men films were the characters, and it almost goes without saying that this is an area where The Last Stand could have definitely improved.

Spider-Man 3

Spidey 3’s faults should be obvious to anyone who saw it. For all its moments of awesome spectacle, there were simply too many moments that were flat-out ridiculous: Peter’s temptation to the dark side should have been a bleak, disturbing affair, but it was essentially played for laughs. Peter should have gotten scarier and scarier as a character, but instead he adopted a Panic! At the Disco hairstyle, started wearing eyeliner, and ate a bunch of cookies.

See, you can tell he’s turning evil because he asked his neighbor to make more cookies. He’s so fucking cold.

But anyway, these moments of absurd hilarity (including the jazz club scene, which seemed to be almost directly ripped from The Mask) could have been forgiven if only they’d been sandwiched between more moments of dark, disturbing character development. Spidey 3, for all intents and purposes, should have been the Batman chapter: in gaining ultimate power and abusing it, Peter sees how truly dark and brutal he can become. There is one perfect moment where Peter actually exhibits this behavior (when Harry throws a pumpkin bomb at him, Peter dodges it, hits it with his web, and – without even looking back – hurls it backward at Harry, where it explodes only inches away from him); why not have more of those types of scenes instead of the ridiculously comedic scenes where Peter walks down the NYC boulevard, pointing at women and dancing in doorways?

Hard Candy

If you haven’t seen Hard Candy yet and were planning on it, go ahead and skip to the next film. For those of you who have seen it, you know what I’m talking about – while 90% of the film consists of a Park Chanwook-ish revenge thriller, the first fifteen minutes contain some fantastically awkward and disturbing scenes as a 35-year-old photographer attempts to seduce a 14-year-old girl at a coffee shop after chatting with her over the internet.

If there’s one problem with Hard Candy it’s that, for all the visceral violence of the film’s revenge portion, it never really gets as odd, ambiguous, or outright affecting as it did during those first fifteen minutes, when the audience was still under the impression that little Hayley may very well end up having sex with a guy twice her age. It may sound disturbing to ask for another thirty to forty minutes of more pedophilia, but these disturbing scenes of seduction really show Hard Candy at its best: Jeff flirts with Hayley, Hayley flirts back, and both characters subtly and knowingly try to talk around  the elephant in the room (namely, that both characters seemingly want to have a great deal of disturbing sex with each other). The dialogue and performances would seem totally at home if put in a separate adult romance film, or a teen romantic comedy – which makes it all the more disturbing that the audience is forced to watch these two mature characters, one underage and one not, suggestively flirting with one another (at one point, Hayley goes so far as to show Jeff her bra, if only for a split second.

Once the film’s major twist comes, turning the film into the story of a young girl torturing and taking revenge upon an adult pedophile, it loses that terrifyingly awkward dynamic between the two: the audience still doesn’t know exactly who to root for (on the one hand, Jeff is a pedophile, but on the other hand, Hayley is cruel, conniving, and borderline insane), but the film is much easier to handle once it settles into an easily-recognizable (but admittedly riveting) revenge plot. The opening scenes of flirting between the two leads remain some of the most ambiguous and difficult-to-swallow footage in recent independent film: another half hour or so of these sorts of scenes before the big twist would have been more than welcome.

Smokin’ Aces (maybe)

I’ve already classified Smokin’ Aces as the most frustrating film ever made, but it bears repeating that many of the film’s flaws could have been fixed simply by the addition of more footage.

Nothing could fix the ridiculous, completely unwarranted plot twist at the end of the film, but Aces has too little action and too little character development – things that could have been improved by another half hour or so of footage. As it stands, we meet a character, we get to know the absolute minimum necessary about them, and then they either die or almost-die, while the audience feels absolutely nothing.

Not to mention that, for a film that revolves around a dozen different violent characters all trying to kill/protect/arrest the same character, there just isn’t enough goddamn action. The film could have seriously stood to benefit from more balls-out action scenes, and the addition of such scenes would be the only reason Smokin' Aces should be allowed to go on any longer than it does. Hence the "maybe."

I get exhausted just writing about Smokin’ Aces, so I’ll leave it at this: there isn’t enough truly good shit in Smokin’ Aces. The film constantly seems like it’s just about to show something awesome, but it never quite happens – maybe a longer running time would have fixed this. Maybe.

The Warriors

Here’s the problem with The Warriors: Cyrus’s opening speech to the assembled gangs of New York, apart from being one of the greatest monologues ever written, sets the stage for a truly epic film. The idea of all of the gangs in New York simultaneously banding together to overthrow the police and take over a city? Not a building, not a block, but an entire goddamned city? We’ve seen a lot in gangster films, but we’ve never seen something on that scale. Cyrus’s speech is delivered so perfectly, and with such gusto (if you can say that you didn’t yell “CAAAAAN YOUUUUU DIG IT” at least once after seeing this film, then you are fucking lying) that both the film’s characters and the audience are totally psyched up for it

Then Cyrus gets shot, the Warriors get framed, and the entire film turns into a chase movie. In many ways, The Warriors shares a problem with Hard Candy: through some fantastic opening scenes, the audience is meant to believe that they are about to watch a new, totally unusual type of film before the narrative suddenly changes course, turning something entirely original into an easily-identifiable genre picture. Granted, both Warriors and Candy are extremely good genre pictures, but they do indeed fall into safe archetypes (the revenge flick and the chase flick, respectively).

As it stands, the plot of The Warriors is pretty taut – asking for extra footage is something of a cheat, as another hour where we see Cyrus’s plan going into action would essentially turn The Warriors into a completely different film. Still, every time I watch the film, I keep hoping – no, praying – that just once, Cyrus might live and see his plans to fruition.

28 Weeks Later

I’ll be honest – I didn’t expect much from 28 Weeks Later. I enjoyed 28 Days Later, of course, but I (and, I assume, many others) expected that Weeks would be just another horror sequel, devoid of any meaning, character development, or suspense. I ended up being wrong – the film further elaborates on the “man is the real monster” theme adopted by every zombie movie since Romero by drawing direct parallels to the Iraqi insurgency – but I wasn’t that wrong. 28 Weeks Later is a fantastic, pulse-pounding horror movie, but it gets to the action far too soon.

The film begins as more and more families are allowed back into London, now free of infection once the rage-filled humans died of starvation. As we meet the son and daughter of a London government worker who left his wife for dead, the film promises us many character moments: how will the family come to grips with reality now that the mother is dead? How will they readjust to normal life? We get a good fifteen to twenty minutes of such quiet introspection, but suddenly, and without warning, the character drama is completely left to the wayside in favor of gory zombie violence and grandiose action scenes.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that the violence and action isn’t good – the shot of a helicopter rotor mowing down an entire army of infected is worth the price of admission alone – but the film simply doesn’t follow through on the moral and social questions in raises in the first act. Certain characters we’ve come to accept as our protagonists are suddenly killed or infected once the film goes into action mode: these sudden deaths are shocking and effective, but, at the same time, it means that we never get to see their characters deal with the moral dilemmas they are presented with (How do you forgive a man who left you to die? 28 Weeks Later would believe that you look at him for about fifteen seconds, kiss him, and immediately forgive him).

As is the case with many other films on this list, an extra hour of running time means more character development, which means that the eventual deaths of many main characters are much more emotional and affecting. As it stands, certain characters have very tragic and disturbing deaths, but it’s difficult to really care – at least, not on the same level that the audience cares for the characters who die in 28 Days Later.

28 Weeks Later is a good horror film, but that’s all: just good. Not great. Not fantastic. Not memorable. But with more character development and a greater focus on how human beings would deal with readjusting to family life after a zombiepocalypse, it could have been a true classic on par with the original Dawn of the Dead, instead of feeling like its action-heavy remake.

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