The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones

Clary Fray (Lily Collins) is a Brooklyn teenager who starts drawing a symbol she has never seen, then watches a boy kill a man in a nightclub while nobody else notices. Within the first half-hour her mother is gone, her flat has been wrecked by a demon that looks like a dog turned inside out, and she has been carried off to a cathedral full of young people with tattoos. That is a lot of set-up, and the film has a great deal more where it came from. Harald Zwart’s adaptation of Cassandra Clare’s novel runs 130 minutes and spends perhaps ninety of them explaining the rules.

The explaining is the problem. The screenplay, which Jessica Postigo shares the credit for, has to tell us what a Shadowhunter is, what a rune does, why ordinary people cannot see demons, who the Silent Brothers are, what the Mortal Cup is for and why Valentine wants it, and it does this in corridors, with one character asking a question and another answering it. Clary asks most of the questions. Collins is a likeable presence and does what she can, but a heroine whose main job is to say “what is that” for two hours has nowhere to go, and the script never finds her anything to want beyond her mother and a boy.

The thing that works is the Institute. François Séguin has built a Gothic church kitted out as a dormitory and armoury, with candles and brass, a library with ladders and weapons racked along the walls, and Geir Hartly Andreassen lights it in warm amber against the cold blue of the streets outside, so we always know which world we are in. Gersha Phillips dresses the Shadowhunters in black leather a shade too clean, as if nobody had fought in it, but the look holds together. When the film sits still in these rooms it is close to pleasant.

It does not sit still often. The action is cut by Jacqueline Carmody into short, dim fragments, a blade, a snarl, a body hitting a wall, so that we were seldom sure who had struck whom or from where. The demon in the flat and a later fight in a hotel full of vampires have the same fault: the film seems embarrassed by its creatures and keeps cutting away from them before we have had a proper look. Atli Örvarsson’s score pushes strings and choir under all of it, insisting this is grand, when what we are looking at is a corridor.

We laughed once, properly, and it was at the moment Jace Wayland (Jamie Campbell Bower) sits down at a piano and explains that Bach was one of them. We are fairly sure the line was meant to be charming. It is the film in miniature: a straight face held over material that needed a wink. Robert Sheehan, as Clary’s best friend Simon, is the one actor who seems to know the register, and the film sidelines him for the romance. Jonathan Rhys Meyers arrives late as Valentine, in a long coat and a sneer, and plays it as a man who has decided to have a good time whatever the rest of the cast are doing; we were briefly glad of him. Lena Headey gets one good scene before the plot removes her. Jared Harris, Aidan Turner and Kevin Zegers are all given a function and no character.

The genre is the hidden-world teen fantasy, and the better examples of it, Buffy the Vampire Slayer chief among them, understood that the rules are the least interesting thing about a secret world and the people are the most. Zwart’s The Karate Kid remake was patient about one boy learning one thing. Here he has a dozen things to teach and a sequel to prepare for, and the people are what get squeezed. Most critics landed near where we have, and the complaints cluster in the same place: a story that cannot be followed and a tone that cannot decide.

Readers of the book may get what they came for, since the film is faithful in the way of a checklist. For anyone else it is a 12A that confuses rather than frightens. At home you can pause it to ask who everyone is, which is a question the film itself never quite answers.