Stephen King and Frank Darabont go together like bacon and eggs, Bert and Ernie, Bush and lies. Which is why The Mist is such a welcomed treat; especially after the one-two punch of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. Darabont’s been MIA the last six years after stumbling when he went out on his own with The Majestic, so a return to the land of King is neither unexpected nor unwelcome.



Having said that though, the film is a clumsy plebiscite on religious extremism and elitism, while smacking you upside the head with one of the most demented endings ever filmed for a King property, and that’s saying something.



Based on a King novella, The Mist chronicles the plight of a group of townsfolk who are trapped in a grocery store as a mysterious fog engulfs their town. Inside the mist are a legion of demonic creatures, from bugs to spiders to bird like lizards that vaguely remind one of Anakin Skywalker’s slave master in Episode One (without the Yiddish), that feed on humans. Inside the store, the social strata begins to break down as some refuse to believe in the monsters, others want to hunker down and great numbers begin to listen to the crazy religious lady’s proclamations of Judgment Day.



Darabont has assembled a great crew of character actors to populate his microcosm. Thomas Jane is another one of those great, King everymen that ably leads the cast and holds the centre of the movie as the periphery characters are allowed to be either crazy or belligerent.



On the one hand, there’s Andre Braugher as Mr. Norton, a big city lawyer who’s not lived in the town very long. He immediately casts aside the merest hit that there’s something strained going on, and thinks that the town’s people are overreacting to their plight. He has a strand relationship with Jane’s character, which supposedly involved litigation, but the exact nature or reason is never revealed, which seems like a huge oversight on the part of the script.



Then there’s Mrs. Carmody, played by Marcia Gay Harden; an old fashioned Bible thumper that is all fire and brimstone with none of that love and forgiveness stuff. She’s Jerry Farwell in flower patterns. When the monsters come, she starts a preachin’ and it’s almost like the movie’s becoming like The Crucible with the masses believing that evil is among them and they’re perfectly justified to do anything and everything to rid themselves of it. The basic problem is that while Harden is perfectly wicked, the argument is resolved in typical king fashion: obvious and abrupt.



And speaking of endings, all I have to say is ‘wow’. This thing either ends 20 minutes too late or is some of the most intentionally masochistic stuff ever filmed. Even Blade Runner, which was wall-to-wall dystopia, ended on even more of a high note. Darabont deserves credit for crafting an ending that even King couldn’t conceive of and running with it. And what’s worse is no sooner did the final scene begin did I prognosticate where things were going, but I sat there and thought, “No, they’re not possibly going to do that.” So I was not impressed and dare I say that I was a little offended too.



Up until everything snowballs into an orgy of human sacrifice, religious zealotism and monster feeding, the film is really quite good. But remembrances of good acting, tense storytelling and cool looking monsters devolves quickly after when the script starts to bumble its way into the final act. Satisfying, though with serious faults, The Mist is not the best from either King or Darabont, but they’ve both done worse.