Reflecting on my time since the final viewing, it occurs to me that I may not have entirely given “The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones” the credit that it was due.
While the film remains a shallow and derivative slog with performances so unintentionally hilarious that the movie could be easily re-edited into a parody of post “Twilight” Young Adult cinema, there were things that it legitimately nailed that lesser YA films have consistently dropped the ball on.
Even with a complete lack of tolerable characters to follow and a plot somehow bogged down with exposition yet lacking narrative cohesion by the time of its anticlimax of a finale, the potential of its concept nevertheless shines through despite the problems sitting front and center making the success of its property, if nothing else, mildly understandable.
And if nothing else, it is “Citizen Kane” compared to “Vampire Academy.”
After an unsuccessful escape attempt, rebellious 17-year-old half-vampire Rose Hathaway and her friend Lissa Dragomir are returned to St. Vladimir's, an academy founded to train vampires on how to live in the world, upholding the responsibilities of their own secret society while staying hidden from humanity.
Their return to the academy begins to attract strange threatening messages going far beyond the typical hazing that they receive as social outcasts, forcing them to unravel a conspiracy that threaten their school while walking on thin ice due to their disciplinary probation.
What Went Right
“Right” is a relative term in a film whose best talent is Olga Kurylenko, who looks like she’s biding time until the camera leaves her, but if there is anything to be praised in “Vampire Academy” it would be the attempt at a more lighthearted tone with self-awareness. Rather than play up the melodrama with artificial tension, the movie takes a stab at a stereotypical adolescent audience’s expectations in the form of a teen comedy rather than a teen drama.
Rose is unabashedly snarky, giving the occasional feeling of genre savviness in a sea of competition that believes in the stakes of its own vapid material. In a better film, this eye of parody being pointed toward conventional tendencies could go far.
What Went Wrong
If “City of Bones” was a convoluted and nonsensical plot surrounding thin characters with its lore as its sole saving grace, “Vampire Academy” not only manages to be more shallow and more nonsensical but lack the allure of the setting.
The film has been regularly compared to “Mean Girls,” which would be true if “Mean Girls” conformed to every stereotype that it lampooned.
“Vampire Academy” succumbs to the same major problem that most stories attempting metafictional humor fall victim to; the belief that simply pointing out a cliché as it happens, will change that it is just a cliché. The conspiracy in question follows several of the most basic tropes of storytelling yet still makes little to no sense with the context given by the film. While it may be able to point out the poor quality of its storytelling, rather than manipulate that to break the mold, it lazily plays everything painfully straight hoping to skate by on the barest minimum of effort in the form of a snarky comment that will diffuse the situation with "humor."
While Rose’s sarcasm serves as something of a breath of fresh air at first from the typical charmless female leads often found in this scenario, actress Zoey Deutch ultimately has no actual wit to attach it to, making her running commentary regarding the entire film’s plot as being so cliché come off as smugly irritating the longer the film goes on. Unfortunately, as dry as the material is, Deutch herself doesn't manage to be a particularly remarkable actress either, delivering the bad dialogue so poorly that her performance makes CW actors and actresses look academy award winning by comparison.
Yet despite her pitiful performance as a lead, coming off as a mediocre Ellen Page impersonation, she still gives one of the best performances of the film, setting the stage for the bar to just go lower and lower with each piece of overly drawn out exposition that she delivers entirely in voice over narration.
In addition to being a comedy that fails to elicit even a chuckle, “Vampire Academy” breaks the storytelling rule of “show, don’t tell.” Aspects of the story and setting that could have helped the film to skate by at a Red Box rental are glossed over by Rose’s annoying narration in favor of moving on to the next scene of school socialization on a painfully bland academy set that is unfortunately the lone setting of almost 80% of the movie.
Its humor is poor and obnoxious, its lore and setting are bland and unimaginative, all of the actors give laughable performances and the production values are astonishingly weak for a film receiving wide theatrical release. Had I not seen its poster at my local Cinemark, I’d have assumed it was direct to video and ripe for the picking for Fromage Fridays.
I like to be fair with films that are on a hate bandwagon but I find it hard to believe that even fans of the novel would be willing to sit through an effort this slapdash. Regardless of the quality of the “Twilight” films, at least they have a definitive feel of cinematic quality to them.
Why did it fail
This one is probably even easier than “City of Bones.” While that film under performed, it at least had big names and a sizable budget attached to it.
“Vampire Academy” not only lacked those resources but was additionally tasked with selling a property with far fewer fans and did so in a style immediately off putting to a wider audience. In a cruelly just occurrence at the box office, a terrible film made by relative unknowns put out to capitalize on a trend performed poorly financially.
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