The Mortal Instruments : City of Bones

Year of release : 2013

Run time : 2h10m

Genre : Fantasy / Action / Adventure

Cast : Lily Collins, Jamie Campbell Bower, Kevin Zegers, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Kevin Durand, Jared Harris, Lena Headey

The movie is based on the first book of the Mortal Instruments series, City of Bones, by Cassandra Clare.

Clary is a teenager in New York, who is talking to her friend,Simon, about what to do for her birthday. While writing down a phone number he gives her, she also draws a symbol.Her mother sees it, and rips off the post-it, throwing it away.

Clary and Simon go to a poetry reading, and after, she wants to enter a club, as she sees the symbol she’s been drawing, on the club’s logo, and wants to know what it means.

In the club, Clary sees the man who told the security guy at the door, to let them in, going to talk to someone. The woman and her friend hold him down, while another man k1ls him with a sword. Clary screams and runs out of the club.

In the morning, when she wakes up, she sees she drew the symbol on every paper she could find,filling the room with it.She takes a few drawings and leaves. Her mother wants to talk to her, but she dismisses her as if she’s the mother and her mother is the kid.

She shows the drawings to Simon at a coffee shop, and she sees the man she saw at the club, again, but she seems to be the only one seeing him.

Somebody is knocking on their door, and her mother doesn’t want to answer, so they break down the door. They beat her up,asking for the cup, and she fights with them, until she manages to get into the bathroom and take something (a potion) so they won’t be able to find out whatever they are looking for.

Before this, her mother called her, but she didn’t answer as she was talking to the man no one else can see about the symbol. Her mother then called Simon, but he rejected her call.Clary finally picks up and her mother tells her not to go home, and to tell Luke Valentine is alive and that he found her.

When she gets home, her mother is gone, but she finds a dog which is morphing into something else, who is trying to k1ll her. She blows up the place trying to get rid of it, but the dog is coming back, like T-1000 in Terminator !

The man no one can see comes and k1lls the dog with his sword.

 

Clary goes to her neighbour, who can see the man, who tells her she’s a witch so she can see him too. The woman asks her to pick a card from the deck her mother painted for her, and the Ace of Cups gets attached to her hand. The man says that’s a Mortal Instrument belonging to his kind.

The witch tells her her mother was a Shadowhunter, just like the man nobody can see .

The witch is trying to read her, but she says her mother must have hired someone to block her memories, so she must find someone to break it.

When she finds Simon in her apartment, the man no one can see becomes visible and he introduces himself as Jace, a demon hunter.

Clary goes to Luke’s place, with Simon and Jace, and find him with the people who took her mother. Jace says they are demons working for Valentine and he can’t help him.

Simon waits outside and sees a cop, trying to talk to him, but he completely ignores him, as if he can’t see him.

When Clary and Jace get out, after fighting the demons, they see the cops are demons, and Jace k1lls them with is sword.

They leave Luke tied to the chair, and Jace takes Clary and Simon to the institute where he lives.

As they get there, she collapses and they find out she was bitten by a demon.

After Jace healed her with a rune, he tells her now they know she has Shadowhunter blood in her, as the runes would k1ll a mundane (normal person). The runes remain or appear on their body, looking like tattoos.

Jace tells Clary without the Mortal Instrument Cup, the Shadowhunters are a dying breed.

Meeting the Shadowhunter leader, Hodge, he tells her the story of how the cup was given by an angel to the Shadowhunters, with the angel’s blood (I didn’t know angels were like us, and have blood) in it. Whoever drank from it became a Shadowhunter and could fight evil. He tells her Valentine wanted to control demons and did experiments with the cup, her mother, while pregnant with her, stealing it from him. Hodge thinks Clary might know where the cup is, but her mind is blocked from remembering .

Jace takes her to the City of Bones to get rid of the blockage her mother put in her head, but they can’t remove it, and Jace says it can only be undone by the one who put it there, and luckily for her, she wrote down his name, Magnus Bane.

Going to Magnus’ place, she recognizes the front door, and once there, Magnus confesses her mother used to bring her to him every year to erase her memory, and to forget whatever she saw from the angelic world the moment she saw it.

Waiting for Clary, at the bar at Magnus’ place, Simon drinks his drink spiked with something from the vampires and gets sick.

Clary realizes Magnus is the one who’s been buying her mother’s paintings.

As she talks to Magnus, Jace comes to tell her vampires took Simon. Going to rescue him, Simon tells them it was a trap set for them.

As the blockage in Clary’s head fades away, she discovers all these news skills, and she finds it easy to work with the runes.

She is also falling for Jace, and the feeling is mutual, but as Valentine resurfaces, he lies to them they are both his children, at Hodge’s suggestion.

I liked the movie more than the last time I watched it (I hated it back then), 10 years ago. I actually read the first 3 books in the Mortal Instruments series, at the time, before the movie was released, and I was disappointed that the movie wasn’t like the book, they changed a lot, took many things out and added other things, and the characters don’t look like described in the book.

One thing that bothered me is that everything seems to be handed to the audience, as in Hodge tells Valentine to lie to Jace and Clary (I hate the name) they are siblings, instead of Valentine just saying this to them, letting the audience wonder if it’s true, like in the book.

The two just took this as truth, and didn’t bother doing a DNA test or whatever, do research, to find out if this is true!

The acting was good.

I didn’t like the songs chosen for the movie, they were generic, but the soundtrack per se, was good.

The visual effects were good.

The movie received negative reviews from the critics (13% from Rotten Tomatoes and a 33 metascore from Metacritic ), and higher reviews from the audiences, 58% from the Rotten Tomatoes audiences with a 6.2 Metacritic user score.

Cinema Score audiences graded the movie a B+.

It grossed only 95.3 million dollars at the box office, against a budget of 60 million, being a box office bomb.

Alex Pettyfer was offered the role of Jace but he turned it down. Alexander Ludwig was also among the many actors considered for the role before it went to Jamie Campbell Bower.

You can watch the movie for free, on YouTube.

Rating : Worth a watch !