With "The Mist," a reasonably scary big-bug movie based on a Stephen King novella, writer-director Frank Darabont takes the opposite tack: He blows out the running time and spackles his social observations on top like frosting. Darabont believes he's an important filmmaker, and why shouldn't he? For reasons that escape me and many others, his 1994 drama "The Shawshank Redemption" is ranked the second-best movie of all time in voter ratings at the Internet Movie Database. (It's a perfectly fine film, but #2? Better than "The Godfather Part II" and "Casablanca" and even "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"?)
That bloated sense of purpose turns what could have been a nifty B-movie into a strained, two-hours-plus "Twilight Zone" episode, and, believe me, Darabont's no Rod Serling.
I'm serious: Major spoilers ahead. Stephen King has publicly stated that anyone who spills the beans deserves the death penalty, but I'm willing to take the risk.
Like the old John Carpenter shrieker "The Fog," "The Mist" gets rolling when a mysterious cloud bank descends on a coastal town (this being Stephen King, we're in Maine). There are things in this unholy white-out, they have teeth, and they're extremely hungry. So far, so good.
The filmmaker has been watching a lot of Hitchcock, and "The Mist" plays like the diner sequence in "The Birds" padded to fill an entire movie. There's been a nasty storm the night before, and the supermarket is filled with locals and weekend Richie Riches filling up their grocery carts. They're all trapped inside when the fog comes down, and we're trapped with them.
Our hero is David Drayton (Thomas Jane), a successful local movie-poster artist. His young son, Billy (Nathan Gamble), has come shopping with him, as has his New York-attorney neighbor (Andre Braugher), with whom David has a prickly relationship. As the bodies pile up outside, the crowd divides into panicked groups. The local crazy lady (Marcia Gay Harden, biting into her role as if her agent had presented her with a prize ham) starts preaching that it's the end of the world, and the store's weaker vessels start listening to her as the days wear on.
