Director: Harold Zwart
Starring: Lily Collins, Jamie Campbell Bowyer, Robert Sheehan, Lena Headey, Aidan Turner, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Jared Harris, Kevin Zegers, Jemima West, CCH Pounder, Kevin Durand
In the era of young-adult mass success such Twilight and The Hunger Games, another potential franchise has appeared. But The Mortal Instruments is unlikely to become a beloved series that’ll enchant audiences to watch it time after time like the former two examples. A lot of Cassandra Clare’s book hasn’t translated well from page to screen. There’s charm to it but it’s still flawed.
Clary Fray (Lily Collins) is living a normal life in New York with her English artist mother Jocelyn (Lena Headey) with regular visits from her mother’s friend Luke (Aidan Turner) and poetry readings with her friend Simon (Robert Sheehan). One night at a club, she meets the mysterious and leather donning Jace Wayland (Jamie Campbell Bowyer) while nobody else at the club can see him. When she returns home, her mother has been kidnapped and it’s revealed that Clary and her mother, like Jace, are Shadow Hunters, half-angel half-human beings who must destroy the evil demons of the world. With Jace’s small team of Shadow Hunter, Alec (Kevin Zegers), Isabelle (Jemima West) and Hodge (Jared Harris). They set out to rescue Jocelyn and retrieve The Mortal Cup, a long lost artefact that could bring power to the now dying race of Shadow Hunters, by going to the City of Bones to unlock Clary’s suppressed memories.
There are a huge amount of flaws that can’t be overlooked in the City of Bones. First of all, it’s a complete regurgitation of other successful franchises. The hoards of creatures (in this case vampires) crawling out of a whole in the ceiling heading in different directions about 10 storeys above the adventuring group heroes’ heads has they don’t notice is practically the same shot as the one in the Moria sequence from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The fiery demons brought to mind only this year’s Doctor Who villains from Journey to the Centre of the T.A.R.D.I.S and Wrath of the Titans’ Kronos. The Shadow Hunter’s home, The Institute, is a complete rip-off of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. The plot twists at the end are the same one as in Star Wars, although this is a fault of the book. Has Cassandra Clare never seen Star Wars?
However, there is some charm in the lead performances. Jamie Campbell Bowyer is a little dull as the plot explainer in the first half but he comes into his own in the second act as a dark and brutal man. Lily Collins in great and charismatic and I wish there were a few more scenes where she could actually act instead of running around to poorly constructed action sequences. Robert Sheehan gives an excellently heartfelt performances as Simon in his unrequited crush on Clary.
Some of the supporting roles aren’t up to scratch though. Aidan Turner (The Hobbit’s Kili, Being Human) and Lena Headey (Game of Thrones, Dredd, 300) are some of the upcoming stars of the moment but in this they’re shrunk into small roles that don’t match their star prowess. Jared Harris gives a interestingly creepy performance but, like Turner and Headey, he’s barely in it and barely any of his backstory is explained. We’re told that he can’t leave The Institute because he was cursed by a Clave without actually telling us how, why or what a Clave is. We’re also supposed to believe that Kevin Zegers’ Alec and Jemima West’s Isabelle Lightwood are a brother/sister duo even though they don’t speak to eachother throughout the entire of the film. I don’t think they actually look at eachother while their both conscious. Nor do Jace and Alec but we’re told that they’re best friends. Kevin Durand is just playing a generic supporting Kevin Durand character. CCH Pounder’s Dorothea the Witch could be a more intriguing character where she not just a plot device. Jonathan Rhys Meyers is a decent bad guy in the form of Valentine Morgenstern but, these days, it’s not good enough to only introduce the bad guy and the last minute.
Valentine’s plan makes absolutely no sense. None of it requires a huge stream of energy streaming from the top of a tall New York building and into the sky, another rip-off of an existing franchise (this time last year’s Avengers Assemble). And a certain characters hiding place makes absolutely no sense to the plot.
The film is often afraid to bump off major characters and struggles to get across key aspects of the plot. They never tell us by the end of the film if certain characters survived, an it’s not as if there’s a cliffhanger ending. A lot of the film is disappointing. The great big large scale shots just look a bit cheap and small. Just as we think we’re in for a dark and intense battle sequence, heavy pop music kicks in and just ruins what could be a great scene. City of Bones is a disappointment. There’s certainly some good attention to detail at points in the film but it struggles to ever have a defining moment.
Hodge tells us that all of the mythological stories are true and yet the plot chooses to only use some of the most generic and most-used monsters in fiction: vampires, werewolves, warlocks and witches. Although a sequel (City of Ashes) is already confirmed, this film is likely to join the pile of this year’s book to film potential adaptations that have flopped (critically and commercially) despite well known source material and a promising young star at the centre alongside Beautiful Creatures (Jeremy Irons) and The Host (Saoirse Ronan).
It’s unlikely to ever become as beloved by any audience as Twilight was and The Hunger Games is. The three central actors (Collins, Campbell Bowyer and Sheehan) are impressive and do bring charm to an otherwise dull and humourless (although it does, on occasion feebly attempt) re hash of other fantasy’s. It has a unimaginative and ludicrous plot with the same ending as Star Wars. If it does have a future, I don’t think it’ll be a particularly successful one. I do hope that the next young adult adventures, Ender’s Game, The Maze Runner’s, Divergent e.g, are a significant improvement on this disappointment.
3/10
“Welcome to the City of Bones.”
tuorhothmovies 