Movie Review - 'The Mist'

The Mist

Starring Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden and Toby Jones
Directed by Frank Darabont
Rated R

While Stephen King has had a handful of his stories turned into incredible films, there are far more mediocre to bad adaptations than good. The Mist has a lot of promise but not much drive. Directed by Frank Darabont, who garnered Oscar nominations for King flicks The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, The Mist is good roughly 60% of the time, just not all at once or consistently enough to overcome the other 40%.

Less about any monster that may live in the mist settling in over a small, sleepy New England town than it is about the way people react during a panic and how pack mentality overcomes rational thinking, the film sequesters its characters in a grocery store, where despite a few attacks from creatures they can't identify, they still feel much safer inside than out.

David Drayton (Thomas Jane) and a store clerk with much more going for him than you'd think (Toby Jones) witness the first attack in the loading docks of the store, and have a better idea than anyone else the peril that awaits them. But religious zealot Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden) begins to push the scared shoppers' buttons, slowly turning them into a frenzied flock of Revelations fanatics. However, The dynamic between her character and the others was just wrong. I didn't feel tension, just storytelling conflict, and there's a big difference.

The Mist is kind of Lord of the Flies meets a 1950s monster movie. Darabont tries to heighten the intensity by keeping all his characters marooned in one place, but when things start to get repetitive, this movie feels more like Survivor: Grocery Store than anything else.

Much has been made of the ending to The Mist, which we wouldn't think of spoiling. I will say it's probably my favorite part of the flick, if only because it stands apart from the rest of it. I wish the actions in the first two hours justified a final sequence so powerful, but it's almost worth sitting through the rest of The Mist to get to it.

Almost.