There's something in the mist alright...

Rating: 5/10 (21 November 2007)

...one stinker of a film.
I think Darabont should have kept working on the script for another couple of years because the first half of the film is almost unwatchable. Cutting out almost all the material from the beginning of the novella (the wife gets about 3 lines of dialog), David and his son and neighbor get to the store about 6 minutes into the movie and then the mist comes. There was no time to care about David Drayton or his son...or his wife...and there's certainly nothing throughout the duration of the film to make me care about him. Thomas Jane, who I thought would be pretty good in this, was bland as eggshell white paint. Andre Braugher is all wrong for the annoying neighbor role but then again most of his dialog is awful to begin with. Marcia Gay Harden tries to bring a Tammy Faye Baker spin on Mrs. Carmody...and it works for a little bit but, boy, it gets really old really fast. In fact, a lot of Darabont's buddies (Jeffrey DeMunn and Bill Sadler and the like) return in supporting roles and they're just not good. Only Frances Sternhagen as Mrs. Reppler feels right in her shoes. The camera work is pretty awful. I saw the boom in at least 10 shots...and the film was being shown in the correct ratio 1:85...nice! The build-up to the tentacle attack plays just as poorly as it did in the novella, and the tentacles look like Playstation 1 graphics. It's so incredibly bad. However, things pick up in the second half with the bug and pharmacy scenes. Those 2 sequences are really good...but they're too little too late. Don't get me started on the new ending. First, since Drayton's wife was in 2 scenes and had about 3 horrible lines (maybe other scenes were cut for time...or more importantly because she couldn't act), I really didn't care if she lived or died. Second, the shocking new ending is just as awful as people feared. I heard about it...thought it was interesting at first...but it's just so against the grain of the underlying theme of hope...AND it's pathetically short-sighted. Nobody thought about the gas running out? They couldn't have looked for a gas station? They couldn't have tried to jump into another vehicle at some point ? I was with my parents who were liking the movie a lot more than me and after the shock-ending came my mom turned to me and said, "That ending was really dumb." Amen, mom. Amen.