Something Wicked This Way Comes....

Rating: 7/10 (27 November 2007)

Just in time for Thanksgiving comes the feel-bad movie of the year. Man, I thought after "Gone Baby Gone" that I'd seen the year's biggest downer; I shouldn't have jumped the gun.
"The Mist" is based on a Stephen King short story and is written and directed by Frank Darabont ("The Shawshank Redemption," "The Green Mile"), who has created a cottage industry out of adapting Stephen King stories to the screen. This one contains considerably less philosophical babble than the other two films, both of them bloated and self-important in my humble opinion, and is more of an exercise in visceral, grab-at-your-guts horror.
The movie focuses on a group of townsfolk in a small Maine community who wind up battling for their lives in a grocery store when a giant fog descends on the town after a night of raging storms. It's not long before all sorts of mighty fake looking creepy crawlies come slithering their way out of the mist, and before the people themselves begin going a bit buggy (excuse the pun). None of them is buggier than a crazy religious fanatic played entirely too well by Marcia Gay Harden, who whips the more susceptible into a terrified frenzy with her doomsday babble and becomes a bigger threat than the giant gnats and spiders buzzing around outside. Another group of more rational folk ally themselves with the square-jawed, perfectly stubbled Thomas Jane, who plays a loving dad whose primary concern is his young son. This is the group I'd want to belong to, and it also includes Frances Sternhagen, who starts chucking cans of peas at Harden, to the applause of the audience I saw this with, and the terrific actor Toby Jones, ****SPOILERS AHEAD**** who finally shoots the demented lunatic in the head, again to enthusiastic applause. This wasn't as gratifying to me as seeing her head getting ripped off by a giant octopus would have been, but I guess it's the next best thing.
The movie flirts with greater themes, such as the nature of humanity, the existence of God, etc., but it wisely doesn't veer too far onto any of these paths. Stephen King, despite what Darabont seems to think from his previous films, is not the person to go to for intellectual musings. Darabont makes his film fairly streamlined and sticks to the point, which is to see how and if our merry band of survivors will escape with their lives. I won't ruin the ending for you, but I give the film credit for having the balls to stick with a majorly downbeat ending, even if it did leave me wanting to kill myself. And please heed this movie's R rating -- this is NOT a movie for kids, unless you want your children to be psychologically damaged, in which case go and enjoy.
The film's special effects team can't resist the urge to show us the monsters in all of their tentacled and slimy glory, but I couldn't help but think how much more effective the movie would have been had we never actually seen any of the creatures, and instead had let our imaginations do the work for us.
Grade: A-