The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
Starring: Lily Collins, Jamie Campbell Bower, Robert Sheehan, Lena Headly, Godfrey Gao, Aiden Turner
Directed by: Harald Zwart
Reviewed by Danielle Muir
[rating: 2.5/5]
I know what you’re thinking – here we go, another teen angst-riddled supernatural flick with a love triangle and an edgy female lead. And you’d be right.
Absolutely, unconditionally right.
The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones skirts the border between god-awful and mildly entertaining, mostly stumbling its clumsy feet into the former but having flashes of guilty pleasure. Anyway, we’ve had enough Twilights and Beautiful Creatures’ to know that if this is your thing so really you’ve no-one to blame but yourself if you buy a ticket thinking this will be any different.
This time our heroine is the peculiarly named Clary (played by Phil Collins’ thoroughly eyebrowed offspring Lily), just your everyday artsy hipster who as of late develops an affliction of drawing ovary shaped symbols on anything and everything. After witnessing a slaughtering in a gothic trance club (yep), Clary is tracked down by bleached Mick Jagger-esque ‘shadow hunter’ Jace (Campbell-Bower). After a nasty run in with a demon Rottweiler she learns her mother’s been kidnapped, so Jace takes her and her best friend Simon (I smell a love triangle!) to the shadow hunters crib so they can begin the search.
Look – some of its not that bad. It starts off without breaching any gawdy barriers, Clary and Simon’s relationship is cute, her and Campbell-Bower have good chemistry (despite him looking like an androgynous model) and there are actually some pretty scary monsters. The demon Rottweiler is intense, a bit like an animal out of the first Resident Evil film and the fact the globs of its carcass assimilate back together is pretty gross.
The pace is pretty unrelenting as the gang run for ¾ of the film, with Clary fainting for about half of that. Things go a bit downhill when we first meet Magnus Bane (Gao) – once Clary’s been significantly tarted up in the obligatory make-over scene. The overall camp of the situation is a bit much – and signifies the start of the hamming. There’s glares of jealously from virtually everyone, the inevitable pash scene takes place in a cgi-laden garden and – I’m being serious – the sprinklers go off (spoonfeeding future cat lady’s their ultimate fantasy is pretty funny viewing), the dialogue turns to shiz and everyone overacts.
There’s a bit of a twist (for those of us who haven’t read the novels) that makes things ultra-creepy, and creepier still is the way the characters involved continue to behave but you know, what’s a love story without the drama. And that was some serious drama.
The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones is just another instalment in the lucrative teen girl franchise so if that doesn’t include you, then don’t waste your time.
