Dull Instruments

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
Directed by Harold Zwart
Two Stars

By Jon Fisher

My experience of Mortal Instruments: City of Bones began almost ideally. I knew nothing about it. Hadn’t seen a trailer, hadn’t read a plot synopsis. I’d barely even seen a cast list (and was – at first – pleasantly surprised to see Robert Sheehan from the witty British show Misfits show up).

I settled into the first truly virginal movie experience I’d had in many a month. I was kind of excited – it’s tough in today’s world to simultaneously be a movie buff with all the Internet has to offer on the subject, and to be someone interested in going headfirst into the movie-going experience without any foreknowledge.

I was quite disappointed to discover, within mere minutes of the credits rolling, that Mortal Instruments sucks. Quite badly (or is it poorly? I can never remember). The plot revolves around teen Clary Fray (Lily Collins, quite vanilla), the daughter of two hipster New York inner suburbanites. She has an awkward teenage friendship/budding romance with Simon (Robert Sheehan), a rather spineless and boring chap who finds himself perennially out of his depth and by Clary’s side. The two go clubbing one night, and Clary witnesses a supernatural creature-slayer rip apart a vampire in the middle of a club. This sets in motion a series of events that reveals to Clary that she is, in fact, a supernatural creature slayer, and not the daughter of two hipster New York inner suburbanites.

This scene is set by a series of clunky expository scenes. One of Simon’s first lines is that he isn’t interested in the cute girl at the bar because, he says while staring dreamily at Clary, “I’m saving myself for someone else.” Barf.

What ensues from here is a predictable, boring story about Clary attempting to find and rescue her mother, via multiple encounters with a range of creeps and freaks. What really is irritating about this movie is that the world it creates is neither original nor believable. It’s fine to be a bit derivative, as long as you do something vaguely interesting – the self-reflective hokieness of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for instance. Mortal Instruments, as directed by Harald Zwart (whose biggest feature credit to this point is Pink Panther 2 in 2009) offers little in the way of wonder or thrills. Take an extended sequence in which Clary and her entourage attempt to rescue Simon by navigating a vampire homebase. This entire sequence hints at a tantalising showdown between Clary and her fellow slayers, and the vampires whose might has been hinted at repeatedly. The culmination is a massive downer, nothing more than a monumentally mismatched fight scene in which our heroes are inexplicably attacked one by one when an overwhelming blitzkrieg would clearly have finished them.

I will come clean about something. I walked out of this movie at about the hour point, which is something I haven’t done since… I actually can’t remember. Before we get caught up in the ethical and professional bag of worms that is opened up when one reviews a movie that one didn’t see all the way through, allow me to concede that I was going to give this film one star, but awarded it an additional one in order to give it some benefit of the doubt that it might have gotten better after I left it. I can’t see how it could have, as I justify my early exit because the film had reached a critical mass of awfulness, a tipping point from which I believed it could not recover. I decided, dear reader, that life is too short for such piffle as Mortal Instruments, and went home and got stuck into the Cormac McCarthy novel sitting next to my bed.