Fr. James Martin poses the question at the America blog
A good discussion at Deacon Greg Kandra’s blog
My brief (hah) answer: No.
Done correctly, with appropriate settings, even with a lot of baptisms, the Vigil really shouldn’t last over three hours. If it does (as was the case w/what Fr. Martin reports) – the problems are probably not with the structure of the liturgy or even with the number of initiations, but with other elements.
There’s a lot of extra “stuff” in the Vigil – all of it rich and evocative. There are nine Scripture readings, and I’m a firm believer in doing all of them, every time.
But there are two factors that have the power to unnecessarily extend the length of the Vigil:
1) The settings of the Responsorial Psalms
2) The homily
Think about #1. If there are 7 Responsorial Psalms and each takes five minutes, that’s 35 minutes right there, and one commentor at one of the blogs noted above mentioned hearing a Responsorial Psalm of 10 minutes in length.  I am not sure about the rubrics related to the Psalms – if you must have them, if silence can ever be substituted. What you don’t have to have are elaborate, performance-driven Psalms after each reading.
And #2 – On a night like this, the priest or deacon needs to understand that a lengthy homily distracts from, rather than emphasizes the power of the evening. What he says should be powerful, focused and point to the richness of the rest of the ritual. In about five minutes. He should understand that at the Easter Vigil, the most powerful homilists are the catechumens and candidates. There’s really not much a homilist can add to what they are “saying.”
But in the end, I think the question of length, so bluntly put, is the wrong question and actually sort of …embarrassing, maybe? Especially when you consider, say, the normal length of many Orthodox or Eastern Rite liturgies – every Sunday. And also because of course, historically, the Easter Vigil has always been long – as in all night long, if you go back far enough. In some monasteries, it is still all night long. Michael went to the Vigil in the Extraordinary Form, and it was three hours long (from 11pm-2am) and that was with no baptisms or initiations.
No, the better question is, as Fr. Martin elaborates in his post, is what elements of the Vigil, as lived out in our parishes, are reflective of artistic and homiletic excesses rather than truly at the service of God through the liturgy?
Which is, of course, always a good question to ask.