The third Frank Darabont film to have been adapted from the works of Stephen King, although the first two, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, were not the sort of work for which that author is best known. (Darabont's intervening film, The Majestic, was truly horrible, horrific, horrid, but not in any way intended.) This one, adapted from a King "novella," is much more what we would expect: "Something in the mist! Something in the mist took John Lee!" Said mist has rolled down from the mountain on which there is ostensibly some type of missile-defense base, rolled across the lake, rolled into town, and what's in it -- including the thing that took John Lee -- is a menagerie of jumbo insects, reptiles, mollusks, God knows what. By and by, we get a throwaway science-fictional explanation for this -- really more mythological than science-fictional, more Pandora's Box than Frankenstein's Monster -- but the concern of the townsfolk barricaded inside the local supermarket, The Food House, is simply to survive to the end of the movie: "It appears we may have a problem of some magnitude here," announces the skeptical store manager after viewing the chopped-off tip of a tentacle, still thrashing, at the loading dock. The traditional voice against tampering with nature, though quite properly a religious one, is in this instance a stridently fire-and-brimstone one (Marcia Gay Harden's), going on about "the end of time," never mind the end of the movie; and there is no opposing voice more authoritative than Thomas Jane's, Toby Jones's, Jeffrey DeMunn's, Laurie Holden's, or Frances Sternhagen's (a no-star cast). The computer-generated creatures, very well-done, never overdone, are infinitely more congenial than this shrewish doomsayer, and not even Darabont's slushy, slapdash direction (shallow focus, rack focus, lack of focus) can spoil the party. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd
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