We need to go Rocky III on that ass...

Movies today, they're just too damn long. It used to be storytellers knew when to get in and get out. Take The Godfather, for example: It's an epic, in every sense of the word, and it simply cannot be told the way it must be told in less than three hours. In it you're dealing with the struggle for power and acceptance, self-discovery, betrayal, renewal, and any other theme you can find within the sprawl of this masterpiece. Don't get us started on the second one; our affection for that film runs even deeper.

Or Die Hard, paradigm of the action genre. It stretches just past the two-hour mark, but it never feels bloated and no trace of filler is discernible. You have your frame story - cop husband come to visit estranged wife in high-rise, terrorists intterupt - and just enough secondary plot to support, but nothing's there that feels tacked on. When you have an anti-hero as likable as John McLane, you don't need padding.

Speaking of likeable, has there been a screen character in the past decade more likable than Jack Sparrow? Yet Disney feels the need to corrupt our faith in that character by neutering him, while at the same time forcing him to fight dozens of spare parts for screen time. Not the way to reinvigorate a franchise, if you ask me. What you do is Rocky III it, so to speak.

Remember Rocky III, when Apollo Creed helped turn Rocky Balboa from a lumbering, stationary brawler into a swift, almost nimble fighter's fighter? That's what the film industry needs to do with its movie franchises. You make a celebrated - or at least successful - original, you don't follow it up a 140-minute-plus brain drain like Bad Boys II. No, you make your sequel a leaner, meaner, version of its predecessor. Think Borne Supremacy.

There are sequels who have proven this formula wrong, however, and the easiest examples to spot both lie within the same set of films. X2: X-Men United was one of the few sequels to actually improve upon the original by expanding its scope, deepening its core characters, while bringing in unknown quantities that added to the experience, rather than detract. X-Men: The Last Stand tried to replicate the success of X2 by following that same formula - only "this time with 30 percent less story!" The Ratner method proved big at the box office - for one weekend at least - but the critical and audience reception to his attempt at channeling Singer was tepid to say the least.

What's the moral of the story here, kids? Hell if we know. We just want to see sequels that don't suck. We know how to do it. You've got to go Rocky III on that ass. Do it.