‘The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones” hopes to be the start of a new franchise for tweens and Twi-hards, but the twuth is this twash is anything but a twiumph.
Maybe the author who uncorked the popular book series shouldn’t twi so hard (starting with her pen name, “Cassandra Clare” — actually she’s Judith Rumelt). Rumelt has overstuffed this thing to the groaning point (or maybe I was the one groaning) with so many vampires, demons, werewolves, runes, crypts, warriors, weapons and witches that it’s as if someone handed her a checklist of stuff that sells young-adult fantasy fiction and she couldn’t leave anything out.
Lily Collins plays Clary, the Harry Potter-like girl growing up in Brooklyn without a dad, though given that it’s Collins, I guess you’d call her Hairy Eyebrows. She’s unaware that she’s not one of us human “mundanes” (geez, Judith, when you ripped off “muggles,” you couldn’t find a word a little less similar?), but a magical Shadowhunter like the hunky blond guy named Jace (Jamie Campbell Bower) whom she meets after he runs his sword through someone at a nightclub.
In the first of 75 consecutive expository scenes explaining how we all got here, thousand-year-old Jace tells her about his friends, who wear neck and shoulder tats called runes, and their war with the cult of shape-shifting demons, which attacked her mother in search of an unholy grail that chief villain Valentine (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, in a dreadlocks mullet that is the only frightening thing in the movie) wants for evil purposes that are still being explained in the closing minutes of the movie.
We move on to more back story from a gay guy named Magnus (Godfrey Gao) at a sort of vampire pub who explains he’s been hypnotizing Clary for years so as to repress her memories about who she really is. Jared Harris, Jace’s Shadowhunter scoutmaster, checks in to deliver more back story, and somewhere along the line, local magical black person Dorothea (CCH Pounder), a Brooklyn witch, reads the tarot cards that reveal Clary has a deep connection with cups.
The front story, such as it is, brings battles that aren’t remotely suspenseful or involving, such as a big, silly fight with a gang of pose-y vampires. I think my favorite moment came when Clary, having been stuffed into a lacy little black number and thigh-highs that 1985 Madonna would have deemed too slutty, stops to ask, “How is dressing like a hooker going to bring my mother back?”
Or maybe my favorite bit was the page of dialogue virtually lifted from “The Empire Strikes Back.” Or maybe it was when we learn Bach designed chords to annoy demons because he was a Shadowhunter himself.
In the end, there are so many special effects — to no particular effect and with none feeling special — that I could barely catalog what was going on. Let’s see: Draw this sword away from this evil pentagram, which will close the skylight that sent a beam of light over Manhattan, which will calm the evil bats but . . . Anyway, the main action is in the other room, and there are these friendly werewolves who have promised not to turn wolfy but kinda do anyway, and they’re up against these alien monsters who look like they’re made of ash and apparently freeze if you flash the right rune at them, but we don’t know that until after it happens, which just seems random. “I understand what you did, and I forgive you,” goes one of the closing lines of dialogue. Well, I don’t, and I don’t.