Review of The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (2013) by Mustangmatt07 — 23 Aug 2013

I liked the book a lot, after having just seen the movie, I have a red hand print on my face from the constant face palms I gave myself. I knew going in that not everything would be like the book, but this was bad, like "Eragon" bad. (Eragon was such a bad movie adaption they couldn't make the sequels).

For the most part, I thought they did a good job on the casting. The acting might not have been so great, but at least looks wise, everyone looked the part. The one glaring exception was having Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Valentine. In the book, he was described as being tall, muscular and broad shouldered, with short greyish hair. He was always calm and collected and often dressed in a suit. In the movie, Valentine was portrayed as small, and skinny like Jace, with a little chin and mustache scruff, not to mention dark, almost black hair, with weird little rat tail braids hanging all over. He was also dressed in a black leather biker jacket with no shirt underneath. He was also highly emotional and out of control. On a side note, I thought the guy that played Magnus was horrible as well, from a cosmetic stand point he might have been ok, but his acting in the few brief minutes he had, was worse then Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker.

How anyone that read the books could enjoy this movie was beyond me. They didn't even introduce us to Raphael, the lead vampire that cautioned them from the Hotel Dumort.

Maybe the budget was tight, and they couldn't afford to film at a new location, but the final battle between the werewolves and Valentines Forsaken warriors, would have been a nice reprieve. Instead, the final battle takes place at the institute( holy ground) which kinda negates the entire point of the place, and its the werewolves vs crow/fire demons (which can be killed by a flame thrower apparently), which sounds cool....except the werewolves can't transform, they just kinda stand there like "ok, what now?" as they get picked off one by one. Even if I never read the book, I still would have hated the movie.

At least Jace and Simon's banter was funny at times.