just didn't work...

Rating: 5/10 (29 August 2009)

After two masterful adaptations of Stephen King by Frank Darabont, I was a bit surprised to see him directing "The Mist", a story from the more "classic" line of King's novels. I wasn't sure what to expect: the wonderful stories of "Shawshank Redemption" and "Green Mile", or the flops of many other adaptations. The greatest trouble with the film is that we get both. I expected great character-development from Darabont, but he gave us only bits and pieces, as if never really clear of what his purpose was: making a classic, scary horror or a drama about the people involved in unexpected and terrifying situations. The dramatic scenes were solid, the actors (part underused, somehow plane and uninteresting, except the wonderful Marcia Gay Harden) did their job well, the tension expected was there. Not much going wrong with the horror as well, although nothing out of the ordinary. Good effects, good scares, but most from the "I've seen it all before" category. BUT...scenes changed without any consistency between the two styles, they hardly managed to connect to make the movie a whole, resulting in a constant confusion of events expected to come. Don't misunderstand me, I like to guess at times, as a matter of fact I like when a movie doesn't tell me everything, allowing my imagination to work, but here it was like parts of the film were simply cut out to reduce it to an acceptable runtime. Well, maybe that was what happened. All in all, "The Mist" is not a bad movie, and is definitely one of the better based on a Stephen King novel. As a Frank Darabont piece though is below par, not rising to the expectations, destroyed by a cynical ending, that tries to amplify the drama, the tragedy of the heroes, but falls way over the top. Anyway, by then I didn't really care all that much about them. Worth watching once, but nothing more than maybe a 6 out of 10.