The Mortal Instruments is the first in what was obviously hoped to be a series that would catch on like Harry Potter or The Twilight Saga (or, one presumes, The Hunger Games). Alas, it's more like The Golden Compass, The Spiderwick Chronicles, City of Ember, I Am Number 4, or the Percy Jackson "series" (currently up to #2). It features a naive teenager who's heir to mystical powers but who has been "protected" from that knowledge up until a crisis from the other world claims her mother. The dotter, Clary (Lily Collins, the good Snow White from the bad Snow White movie), and her mom, Jocelyn (Lena Headey from Game of Thrones, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and the under-appreciated The Purge) are perfectly fine, tho Jocelyn gets to spend much of the film doing her Sleeping Beauty impersonation. The rest of the movie is portentous and stylized. It has a few good action scenes, and an interesting wrinkle or 2 in the plot line, but it suffers from the same problem that all these supernatural/demigod films do, which is trying to explain the motives of the bad guys, other than just, well, that's the way villains are supposed to behave. It doesn't get all carried away with special effects but actually lets the actors perform. I will leave it to the females who see it to explain to me why the heavily tattooed shadow hunter Jace (Jamie Campbell Bower) is supposed to set young Clary's heart all aflutter, as he seems to me to be self-centered, boorish, and badly in need of shampoo. But then, maybe that's what's in these days.
