Sunday, November 25, 2007
A+E, Movies, Reviews

A little foggy

‘The Mist’ could use more scares

Director Frank Darabont (“Shawshank Redemption,” “Green Mile”) turns in his shortest Stephen King adaptation—but at more than two hours, “The Mist” is still needlessly super-sized.

Based on a novella, the movie traps artist David Drayton (Thomas Jane), his kid Billy (Nathan Gamble) and various Maine townsfolk inside a grocery store beset by an eerie (yes) mist harboring the kind of hungry, computer-generated monsters only H.P. Lovecraft could love.

Problem is, those creatures have nothing on the monstrous squabbling of the humans, especially End-of-Days religious zealot Mrs. Carmody. She’s played by Marcia Gay Harden, who has to start at such a high pitch of lunacy, she has nothing to build to.
That’s true of much of the movie. Darabont rounds the characters up inside the Food House at a breathless pace, then delivers repetitive scenes of these folks getting on each others’ nerves and starting stupid fights. (Andre Braugher, as Jane’s pugnacious neighbor, suffers the most from this trend; Toby Jones, as a tiny but shrewd store manager, is the movie’s MVP.)
Darabont’s script is in synch with the gee-whiz, proudly square tone of King’s writing. But since he’s both writer and director, there was nobody on set to tell him his movie could lose 20 minutes of jabber and benefit from more close encounters with tentacled horrors and poodle-size spiders. (Arachnophobes, fair warning.)

What could have been an interesting study of religious fanaticism and mob mentality is played out with hammer-stroke subtlety. And, in pursuing his thesis about mankind’s innate corruptibility, Darabont rewrites the ambiguous ending of King’s story. In doing so, he crosses the fine line between bleakness and cruelty … and becomes the movie’s real monster. TWO STARS—Steve Murray