The Mortal Instruments Review

I was so excited to see this movie.  The trailers had me hype.  Let’s face it, after Twilight and Harry Potter ended there hasn’t been a really good supernatural thriller series on the scene and The Mortal Instruments seemed to fill the void.  Notice how I said seemed.  It came with a lot of promise.  The Mortal Instruments is based on a six-volume book series, written by Cassandra Clare and is classified as fantasy young-adult fiction; a genre that box office history tells us translates well to film. I haven’t read the books- but I did go see the movie based on the first book, City of Bones, on opening night in IMAX and I was not impressed. 

The problem with a great movie trailer is that it builds one’s expectations that there will be a great movie as well.  Sometimes our expectations are met and sometimes they are not.  Other, less frequent times, we wish we had waited for others to see the movie to make sure it’s great before we spend our money.  Since I review movies I don’t have that luxury but like those who have overcome bad life decisions I can at least warn others. 

This movie is bad for several reasons but for the purposes of time I will only address three:

1)   The main character, Clary Fray, played by Lily Collins, is SUPER annoying.  I mean before it was over I’d completely lost interest in her survival and her plight.  Though her champion, Jace, played by Jaime Campbell Bower, kept calling her brave, I was hard pressed to find the proof of said bravery in her performance.  Couple that and the absolute lack of any realism in her character- down to the fact that after climbing buildings, running from vampires and fighting demons this chick’s manicure is still impeccable- and you have an altogether uninteresting protagonist. 

2)   This movie is dark.  Very dark.  The whole time you’re in the theater you want to cover yourself in holy water and anointing oil and call on the Lord!  An atheist would be praying after watching this movie.  I couldn’t believe how harsh it was.  Even in the supernatural fantasy genre there is some trait about the main characters that lightens even the most intense parts of the story.  Example- in Harry Potter we had their childhood innocence and the universally relatable experience of school life.  In Twilight there was the timeless and pure love between Edward and Bella.  Here we had three semi-humorous lines from the Jace character that barely balanced the intensity of the scene much less the whole movie.

3)   The storyline was not well crafted.  There is a reason why stories work.  There is a clearly defined hero and villain.  There is a clearly defined mission, a climax, and a resolution.  When I tell you this movie had NONE of that I’m not exaggerating.  Not even a little bit.  You couldn’t tell who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.  The whole time you did not know who to root for or whom you could trust; it was frustrating.  The characters weren’t well developed at all.  You knew very little about who they were and for what morals they stood.  To increase your frustration a budding romance between Clary and Jace gets crushed to smithereens when Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ character, Valentine, reveals a very Flowers in the Attic-type plot twist.

City of Bones did have great special effects and a kick-ass sword fight scene toward the end.  But that wasn’t enough to make going to see it worth the time or the money.  Just trust me when I say that unless you’re cool with all I’ve listed above, you may want to choose a different movie. 

2/5 Stars