The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones Review

• 21st Aug 2013

Adapted from the teen fantasy fiction series by Cassandra Clare, City of Bones is the first in what you can be sure the studios hope will be a mega-money making juggernaut a la Twilight. The film follows Clary (Mirror Mirror’s Lily Collins) whose world is turned upside down by the revelation that there are things that go more than bump in the night. In fact, she is very much a part of a hidden world of demons, vampires, warlocks and a race of angelic warriors called Shadowhunters. Clary must come to terms with her strange new talents, find her kidnapped mother and battle the forces of evil ranged against her, spearheaded by the evil overlord, Valentine (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). To make things a tad easier however, she is joined in her escapades by Jace (Twilight’s Jamie Campbell Bower), for whom she harbours more than a little crush.

Thinly drawn characters and severely patchy scripting are two of the issues with the film. Despite Bower et al occasionally pulling off a quippy remark, they simply can’t make up for lines so unbelievably ridiculous that the audience in the screening greeted – one line in particular – with the correct amount of shocked mirth. The climactic scene in Jace and Clary’s burgeoning relationship is so spectacularly misjudged that laughter was really the only option. So hideously cheesy, backed by an unbearable sugary wailing of song and utterly devoid of emotion, it was really shocking.

Another major problem with City of Bones is that there is far too much information forcefully pumped into this one film. Facts that are revealed two books later in the series are thrown out at you at a blinding rate. I am not sure trying to stuff quite so much of the series’ mythology into one film was a very good idea. One of the biggest secrets – almost the entire point of the first books – is just dumped into the conversation, rather breathlessly and with very little fanfare. It loses any of the shock value, especially when it is almost immediately shrugged off as untrue. Very odd. Each revelation, each strange facet of the other world that the characters are now inhabiting, is  given the same amount of dramatic emphasis, which essentially downgrades all of them to a mild interest.

There is violence, but it’s the standard bloodless kind we have all come to recognise from the now ubiquitous PG-13/12A certificate. The scoring throughout was abrasive and ill-judged. Ubiquitous cinematic strings swell at apparently random intervals, one of most annoying, yet strangely insignificant, scores I have heard for a while. All in all, there is more to dislike than like in this film.

The young cast is generally pretty good. Particular mention should got to Robert Sheehan, as the forlorn damsel-in-distress Simon, who does rather well with some of the only emotionally successful scenes in the film. The adult cast has less to do, but they do it well regardless, with the rather wiffy exception of Meyers as Valentine. Neither menacing nor particularly imposing, he just comes across as whiny. And haggard. Didn’t he used to be pretty?

It’s hard not to compare this to Twilight. Whether the teens will lap it up at the same rate, it’s hard to say, not being of the teenage persuasion. It’s not a good film, but neither is it particularly awful and it doesn’t grate on the feminist sensibilities in the same way Twilight does.

Hannah Turner