Complaining that Meet the Spartans is too short is like complaining that a virus gave you nausea but not diarrhea. I don't understand why several critics have listed this among their other gripes. (The Slate review is an example.) The length is the least of that movie's problems.

For the record, the movie "ends" at the 65-minute mark. Then there's a musical number for a few minutes, then a few minutes of credits. Then the credits stop and we get some "bonus" scenes, i.e., material so bad it didn't even deserve a place in the movie, which itself was atrocious. When the credits start rolling again, this time for good, we're at the 75-minute mark. Some have said the movie is "barely" an hour long; that's not quite fair. All the non-credits material adds up to around 72 minutes -- short, but not unheard of.

From a consumer's point of view, however, it might be something worth mentioning. I have a friend who doesn't like to pay full price for movies that are under 90 minutes. He feels like he's getting ripped off. Why pay $10 for an 85-minute movie when the same $10 can buy you a 150-minute movie? That's his reasoning. Granted, my friend is a moron, but I'm sure he's not the only one who thinks of movies in terms of quantity rather than quality.

The rest of us don't care. As Roger Ebert likes to say, "No good movie is too long. No bad movie is short enough." Indeed, I paid full price for Meet the Spartans, and I would have been delighted if it had ended after 25 minutes. I might have even praised its brevity! I probably would have given it a D- instead of an F.

After all, it's not the size of the movie that matters, it's what you do with it. A lot of Disney's animated classics are short: Dumbo is 64 minutes; Alice in Wonderland and Sleeping Beauty are each 75 minutes;Peter Pan is 74 minutes. The first Toy Story is 81 minutes. The old Marx Brothers comedies tended to be around that length, too, and that was including the always-superfluous musical numbers. I doubt anyone walked out of any of those films thinking they'd been cheated out of their money.

Personally, I like shorter movies. When I'm at a film festival, if I have a choice between two films that I know nothing about content-wise, I always pick the shorter one. Almost every movie I've seen that was more than two hours long could have been trimmed. (I said almost: There have been a few long films where every scene was integral. But not many.) In fact, once a film goes over the 2:15 mark, I start to get angry at the director. "Listen, buddy," I say to him, whoever he is, in my head. "Most filmmakers manage to tell their stories in around 100 minutes. What is it about YOUR story that's SO IMPORTANT it takes 30 or 40 or 50 minutes longer than usual to tell it? Oh, please, great director, ENLIGHTEN ME!" (I get very sarcastic when I talk to directors in my imagination.)

The real issue with Meet the Spartans' running time is that it's indicative of the film's larger problem: It was made even though no one actually had any good ideas for it. Even the filmmakers' bad ideas barely added up to 70 minutes. When you've used all the powers of your brain to write a film, and what you've come up with is both terrible and short, that should be your cue to give up and move on to something else. And if you knuckleheads would stop GOING to these lame "spoof" movies, then maybe the people who make them would get the picture. But that's an issue for another time. I'm not going to berate you for seeing Meet the Spartans. You've suffered enough.

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Eric D. Snider (website) is only about 5'10", but you should see his director's cut!

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