Review: Super powers can't save 'Mortal Instruments: City of Bones'

"The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones" is no exception. It's the first film adaptation from Cassandra Clare's series of novels, and the fact that there is already at least one sequel planned feels more like a threat than a treat.

Directed by Harald Zwart from a screenplay by Jessica Postigo Paquette, the story has a lot of ground to cover with a deep, albeit nonsensical, internal mythos that must be explained quickly. Right up to the last, the film is still setting things up.

The movie stars Lily Collins as Clary Fray, a young woman who comes across as something of the neoconservative delegate of recent young adult heroines. She complains that she is put into a dress that is too tight and too revealing, that her shoes are impractical and all the while she wants to get back to her mother. One of the first things she does upon discovering she has supernatural powers is use them for home renovation and redecorating.

The film is set in modern-day New York City, but there are no real connections to contemporary life, as even the cellphone service seems a fantasy, working after traveling though some sort of mystical dimensional portal. When a character is introduced as the "high warlock of Brooklyn," he does not appear, as one might expect, as someone with an interest in old-time haberdashery and do-it-yourself pickling techniques. Rather, he is the sort of internationalist jet-set glam that has long represented sybaritic impropriety, from "The Hunger" to "Blade."

Collins has none of the gritty fortitude and self-possession of Kristen Stewart in the "Twilight" films or Jennifer Lawrence in "The Hunger Games," leaving her as little more than a young woman with extraordinarily luxuriant hair and her rather formidable brow line.

Lena Headey, a fearsome screen presence who always exudes a regal can't-touch-this-itude, such as in her role on "Game of Thrones," spends nearly the entire movie either offscreen or inert in some sort of frozen state. Though her character apparently has an expanded role in the future stories, here she's wasted and a constant reminder of how wimpy the play-acting kids all seem. Jared Harris and Jonathan Rhys Meyers likewise float through without much to do, while CCH Pounder provides unintentional comic relief when a tentacle emerges from her neck.