The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones: and new teen movie series

Take a sprinkling of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, a dash of Harry Potter and a pinch of Twilight, mix it all together with a soft rock soundtrack and you'll end up with City of Bones.

Jamie Campbell Bower in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones. Courtesy Constantin Film Produktion
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The Mortal
Instruments: City of Bones
Director: Harald Zwart
Starring:
Lily Collins, Jamie Campbell Bower, Kevin Zegers, Adrian Turner
***

Take a sprinkling of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a dash of Harry Potter and a pinch of Twilight, mix it all together with a soft rock soundtrack and you’ll end up with City of Bones, the first film adaptation based on the series of The Mortal Instruments young adult books by Cassandra Clare. The Brooklyn teenager Clary (Collins) starts to notice a young man named Jace (Bower) no one else seems to see and it’s not long before she discovers there’s more to our world than she thought. The movie romps along for the first hour as Clary discovers shadowhunters and other beasties around her, but then slumps in the second half as a weak love triangle between Clary, her best human pal and Jace slows the action down. When Collins’s striking eyebrows aren’t battling for screen space alongside Bower’s distractingly chiselled cheekbones, we get brief glimpses of the bad guy Valentine (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), but not enough to feel any real menace as Star Wars-style revelations are bandied about in the lacklustre finale. Maybe things will pick up in next year’s sequel.

artslife@thenational.ae

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