Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible highlights how movie runtimes have become bloated - Karl Puschmann

Tom Cruise’s new film, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, runs for a lengthy 170 minutes. Photo / Paramount Pictures Skydance

• Tom Cruise’s new film, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, runs for 170 minutes.
• The film has received mixed reviews, with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 79%
• Long films are now common, requiring strategic bathroom plans and testing audience patience.

At a pivotal moment in a pivotal scene in Tom Cruise’s new action blockbuster Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, a character waves away the need for a lengthy explanation with a breezy, “It’s a long story.”

I nearly choked on my popcorn. Two hours into the film, with the guts of another hour still to go, the movie was suddenly concerned with brevity? Really? I may have been the one with an increasingly urgent need to dash to the bathroom but, with that line, the movie was the one taking the p***.

There’s a lot to like about the new M:I film. Its running time, however, isn’t one of them. I’m not here to review the movie or offer up a full critique, but I will say that, at 170 minutes, or two hours and 50 minutes, the eighth instalment in this nearly 30-year-old movie franchise is simply too damn long.

Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025). Photo / Paramount Pictures

It’s the culmination of a trend that began with the second film in the series, from 2000. Mission: Impossible 2 – movies didn’t need subtitles back then – clocked in at 123 minutes. That was just 13 minutes longer than the original and only a smidge over the two-hour mark. Mission: Impossible 3, from 2006, added a thematic three minutes, creeping the runtime up to 126.

By 2011, the series had dropped numbers in favour of words, with M:I – Ghost Protocol logging in at 132 minutes. Then came the brief blip of 2015’s Rogue Nation, which was still too long but trimmed things down to 131 minutes.

But from there, the franchise went completely off the rails. M:I – Fallout, from 2018, ballooned to 147 minutes, and 2023’s M:I – Dead Reckoning Part One reckoned it warranted an outrageous 163 minutes before being topped by the latest entry.

The real impossible mission at the heart of Mission: Impossible? Sitting through one without nipping to the loo.

The Brutalist, starring Adrien Brody, runs for a brutally long three and a half hours.

But it’s not just these movies, it’s all movies. The Brutalist, Adrien Brody’s Oscar-winning film about an architect who relocates from Europe to America, runs for a brutal three hours and thirty-five minutes. Critic favourite Sinners is a hellish 137 minutes, and Marvel’s latest superhero extravaganza, Thunderbolts*, is a cracking 127 minutes.

All of these are too long. Ninety minutes is exactly how long a movie should be. True visionaries can have an extra half-hour. But that should be the cut-off. Especially for an action flick.

One of the greatest action movies ever made is Arnie’s 1985 classic Commando. It has everything: a gripping story about a concerned dad rescuing his kidnapped daughter, kick-ass, over-the-top action scenes, and an abundance of brilliant one-liners. And it delivers all of that in a concise and satisfying 90 minutes.

In the time it takes to watch M:I – The Final Reckoning, I could have watched Commando and then made it 80 minutes into a rewatch. Which, if I’m being honest, I would’ve enjoyed more. Sure, Arnie doesn’t do his own stunts, but Tom Cruise doesn’t get any zingers in on the baddies when he dispatches them, so it kind of evens out.

Tom Cruise does his own stunts in Mission Impossible - Final Reckoning. Photo / Paramount Pictures Skydance

My point is that film-makers today need to be asked one simple question: is your movie better than Commando?

Nine times out of 10, the answer is going to be no. And then they need to get cutting. Heck, even when the answer’s yes, they need to get cutting.

Of the top 10 films at the New Zealand box office this week, not one runs 90 minutes. A couple come close -the David Attenborough-narrated documentary Ocean clocks in at 97 minutes, and the drama Small Things Like These is 99 minutes - but none of the movies on the list is better than Commando.

Elijah Wood in the Lord of the Rings. Photo / New Line Cinema

Movies have gone from blockbusters to bladderbusters. Elongated run times are no longer the preserve of proper epics, like Sir Pete’s Lord of the Rings trilogy or the latest Scorsese masterpiece. Now, even a bog-standard action flick demands more than two and a half hours of your life and a strategic bathroom plan.

There are a few explanations for why movies now require you to clear your schedule and pack an overnight bag. The most common is that today’s stories are deeper and more complex, and that big studios are intent on delivering epic experiences. I’d rather they delivered a well-edited, efficient story that respects my time.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning somehow manages to be both economical and bloated. Every line of dialogue has been stripped to the bare minimum, yet characters spend endless scenes constantly explaining what’s happening and reiterating the catastrophic thing that’s about to happen unless Tom Cruise gets a digital key, gets captured, escapes, boards a submarine, escapes a different submarine, gets rescued and survives an admittedly impressive biplane chase.

It’s a long story. I just wish someone had waved away 80 minutes of it.

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is in cinemas now

Karl Puschmann is a journalist and editor, specialising in arts and culture.