Interesting point, gerard. I think that some movies succeed very well even if they're over 2 hours long, whereas others just seem to meander too much. I don't know if PE was too long for me, per se, even though I think it was over 2 hours, but I felt the story arc could've been tightened up a bit. I felt there *was* a story there, but I really didn't feel the progress of the story so much the first time. There were a lot of extraneous characters that were put in, and then not really developed, so the question was should they really have added all that detail in the first place? For instance, Channing Tatum was pretty much wasted as Pretty Boy Floyd, with barely any screen time, and that scene was not historically accurate:
[spoiler]Pretty Boy Floyd was not killed until *after* Dillinger.[/spoiler]
But that scene led way to the scene in the jail cell where Dillinger meets Purvis, but
[spoiler]that scene wasn't historically accurate either, because Dillinger and Purvis never actually met! It was a great scene, and it was probably important to put the two main characters together for at least one scene, but I don't know if Pretty Boy Floyd had to have been mentioned.[/spoiler]
Faults aside, it was a great looking film with top notch acting, great sets, fantastic action scenes, beautiful costumes and an awesome soundtrack. I think that it was just that some folks' expectations of a Depp/Bale/Cotillard/Mann film were too impossibly high.