Did you see The Onion's take on this?

Seriously, I did not think it was too long, or too slow. The 'out of the frying-pan into the fire', one-thing-after-another quality of the book translates really well to film - and with every Saturday matintee cliche in it (many awesome cliff-hangers), it certainly didn't drag.

The country town cinema I watched it at did not do justice to the high-def 48 FPS frame rate - there was dust spots all over the film and some reels were distinctly blurry. I was a bit suprised that it was film they were still using (the click-click-clicking of the projector was audible all through it - although it didn't seem any faster than normal). I am assuming all the lack-lustre aspects of the cinematography I saw were the evil work of rushed distributors and lax projectionists (although there was a small band of cinema staff watching at our session, none of which seemed bothered by the low quality of the film or deficencies in its projection, so maybe the projectionist was doing the best s/he could with the technology available.)