Believe it or not, what really gives Watchmen the elbow room to succeed is its intimidating two hour and forty-three minute running time. With a ton of back story, its layered, flawed, very human characters, and an ongoing plot line that spans at least two generations, this thing has "epic" written all over it and accomplishes in just under three hours what some series of action flicks can't do in three or four films.

And it's appropriate, because such a hefty time investment not only shows a considerable amount of respect for the source material on the part of the filmmakers, but it demonstrates a commitment to quality filmmaking not often seen nowadays. The characters are allowed to flesh out and explore their histories (which are considerable), the meaning of their interactions with one another, and illustrate for the audience that while they are possessed of some extraordinary abilities, they are simply everyday people who have chosen to occasionally take up the struggle against crime in the streets. I found myself settling in for a relatively lengthy moviegoing experience, but confident, from the first frame, that my patience would be rewarded by an engaging story, sympathetic (if somewhat conflicted) characters, and some really good action thrown in for good measure. For the most part, I wasn't disappointed.

Make no mistake, the creepy, extremely effective Jackie Earle Haley is the real star of this one. His Rorschach, so named because his mask resembles the ink blot test we're all so familiar with, is the real mover and shaker behind the cause, the one guy who refuses to quit fighting just because no one else is on the clock anymore. His costume almost invokes the Invisible Man even though he (like most of the others in the group) has no real super powers beyond his extreme agility and hand-to-hand skills that wouldn't even set him apart from Batman. Malin Akerman handles the role of the second Silk Spectre relatively seamlessly, although any actress with a high enough kick could have done the same; Jeffrey Dean Morgan is convincing as The Comedian, the self-centered bastard that he was, and Billy Crudup did pretty well himself with Dr. Manhattan, the only member of the group with actual powers and, as it turns out, probably the weakest link in this particular character chain for that very reason.

It's far from perfect; most of my gripes have to do with the absolutely terrible celebrity/political lookalikes we see on-screen, including a barely-passable Richard Nixon and a Ted Koppel I didn't even recognize until later. Lee Iacocca was even worse. For a film that so effectively dares to take us into a rewritten version of history, it's strange that they could completely fail at something so straightforward as on-screen impersonations.

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