Ouch! It is hard to even know where to start with this one. It is largely uninteresting for the first half hour, with the exception of an early, apartment destroying encounter with a demon, and then it descends further and further into tedious nonsense. I swear the third act is around five days long. The prime concern of the entire picture, as far as I can tell, is shoehorning in as many details, moments, and tensions from its presumably popular literary source (unread by me) as it can. It never even flirts with coming together as a proper, well-structured film with clarity, momentum, or suspense. And it covers so many child and teen friendly fantasy bases both in plot (Grail quest! love triangle!) and content (angels! demons! vampires! werewolves!), nothing is distinctive or satisfactorily explored. The weight of the vast catalog of jargon casual viewers are forced to navigate and comprehend is daunting, and there is no reward for trying. Lily Collins is never more than bland as the cipher of a heroine, so there is no sexual tension between she and her male co-stars nor a sense of authentic girl-power empowerment. A few intriguing veins, including an unexpected amount of overt or teased homosexuality, are opened, but not much of note flows from them.

D

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones

Well this is your typical teenie bopper fantasy junk, but it's not actually that bad, and it's rather likeable in certain areas. I went in with the lowest of expectations. Lily Collins is hot, I suppose, and I thought the jokes about her looking like a hooker were kind of funny. The spade being swung into the black woman's head was cool, as was the portal bubble punch to Jonathan Rhys Meyers' face, and a few other things. As much as I don't care for this movie and the books it was adapted from, I still do not think badly of this film. It's light-hearted enough and doesn't take itself seriously, which is a key aspect in why many people dislike the Twilight movies.

The film is too long, though.

C