When Clary (Collins) meets goth dreamboat Jace (Campbell Bower), she learns that she's a Shadowhunter, a half-angel whose job is to protect humanity from demons. When her mother (Headey) is kidnapped, Clary and Jace team up with her best pal Simon (Sheehan), who nurses a secret crush on her, to travel into the New York underworld, where werewolves and vampires wage war with demons and angels. At Shadowhunter headquarters, she meets siblings Isabelle and Alec (West and Zegers) and leader Hodge (Harris), all of whom warn her about the evil Valentine (Meyers).

The plot plays out as a series of smallish quests, as Clary visits the City of Bones under a cemetery, consults with a queeny warlock (Gao), breaks into a church for a cache of weapons, and so forth. None of this quite hangs together, as the filmmakers are more concerned with depicting every setting than with making a movie that makes sense to an uninitiated audience.

Despite lively direction and decent effects, the cinematic approach isn't particularly original. The moment Clary discovers the truth about herself, she suddenly starts wearing leather bondage-wear like everyone else. And her special powers seem to impress everyone even though they look rather unexceptional in the grand scheme of the elaborately wacky mythology. The cast is fine, although none of the characters is well enough defined for the actors to do anything very interesting.

Frankly, there's so much going on that nothing really resonates. This book series really should have been adapted into a TV series, although it might be too similar to True Blood for that to work. The plot of this episode is essentially a mash-up of The Empire Strikes Back and Pretty in Pink, with added vampires, demons and werewolves, plus a random Stargate-like portal. This probably works in the book, where every character is fleshed out, but on-screen it's rather exhausting.

themes, violence

15.Aug.13