Movie studios are constantly trying to figure out how they can get their hands on the next Harry Potter franchise: that's to say, they want to draw audiences in with an intriguing new fantasy adaptation (all the better if it's young adult fantasy, mind) and hopefully keep them interested for, oh, eight or nine more movies. This is incredibly difficult to do, of course, when you're making films as inherently bad and amateur and awful as The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones. Set in a world where a young girl learns that she descends from a line of demon hunters, this was arguably ripe cinematic territory. When tackling something like this, however, there are two very simple rules: don't make it confusing, and don't make it boring. Director Harald Zwart fails to do both to a rather hideous degree, resulting in movie so riddled with exposition and long, drawn-out instances of nothing happening that getting to the end felt like a genuine act of mercy.
