Less is more may be a common adage but it’s not one that applies to Ain’t Them Bodies Saint. From the simple old-timey title sequence, this is a film that aims at quiet contemplation but mostly just falls flat. While there are a lot of ideas hinted at throughout, little is ultimately brought to light and we’re left with a soft-gummed mass that asks little of and offers little to its audience.

While starsCasey Affleck and Rooney Mara are certainly on point here, it’s the moustachioed Ben Foster (3:10 to Yuma) that offers up the most solid performance of the group. Playing with subtlety and subtext, Foster isn’t your typical police officer but it’s hard to put your finger on why he works as well as he does. He’s lawful good to the T but there is an uncommon complexity to his undeserved adoration of Mara’s Ruth that makes him more intriguing than the morally grey characters surrounding him.

Deep within said moral greyness, Rooney Mara (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) continues to give worthwhile performances and here plays with guilt and forgiveness. Burying her guilt rather than confronting it, she is an emotionally stranded character who has built castle-high walls around herself. But through her guarded facade is a woman lost. Even though we only see the initial inklings of her letting her guard down, Mara works the nuance and milks her rather slim character for all she’s worth.

Casey Affleck (Gone Baby Gone), on the other hand, is fine but I’m still not won over by him. He’s scraggly and pitiable but he lacks the oomph of a leading man, making it all the more difficult to root for such a flatly written character. As the vultures of his past circle closer, there is neither a big reveal nor any character revelation to up the stakes.

Ultimately, mystery can only go so far. When your faceless villains aren’t given any motives, they become bland sketches rather than shadowy demons. They don’t add anything to the picture because they are lifeless and instead just showcase the more hollow aspects of the film. The mystery runs itself dry and we’re left disappointed and unfulfilled.

While director of photography Bradford Young nabs some stunningly desolate imagery, winning him the Cinematography Award at Sundance, the camera work is mostly as wooden as the plot points. Perhaps I’ll never quite understand why this particular brand of dusty film, accented with brown and grey filters, always feels the need to be so restrained and inward peering but this egotistic meditation just serves to hold it back.

Although there are some intriguing themes taking place, none are aptly fleshed out. Even a committed cast can’t make magic out of nothing, especially with a script that’s this bare-bones and sulky. Posing as a film deeper than it is, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is a rare case where the title is more provocative than the work.

Going to see The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones is like getting a filing from a dentist whose supply of Novocaine has run dry. It’s a painful eternity of an experience that hacks and saws at our entertainment-guzzling sensibilities, defying each and every lesson culled from filmmaking 101 and spewing formula like a film-school-dropout on Ipecac. The “talent” both in front of and behind the camera is so raw-dogged and askew that it almost seeks to redefine “so bad, it’s good”. Needless to say, it misses that mark by a long shot and winds up in its own realm entirely, almost unknowingly. The result is strangely akin to watching a child play in a turd-peppered litter box, mistaking it for the sandbox he knows and loves, helpless to clue the poor thing in on its brown-handed error. 

Even by teen franchise standards, Zwart’s hyperventilated storytelling is embarrassingly crude and majorly derivative. He’s proven himself to be a more slack jawed character director than Bill Condon with less story assurance than Rupert Sanders. Anytime I’m sitting in a theater daydreaming about  Twilight, a loss has occurred on an epic level.  

At the helm of the cluttered wreckage is Lily Collins as Clary, a plain-Jane teen who discovers that the blood of Shadow Hunters run in her veins when her mom is abruptly kidnapped. Shadow Hunters are age-old crossbreeds between humans and angels, invisible to the normal human eye, sent to Earth as guardians. They are tasked with ridding the world of demons that physically manifest themselves as fiery monsters and tentacle dogs. Also, vampires, because fuck you.

Naturally, werewolves are also in the mix and they’re aligned with the good guys, maintaining a shaky and largely undefined alliance with the Shadow Hunters. But the relational web is so whitewashed and barren that it’s hard to get a read on exactly who is who and what is what and why exactly you’re supposed to care about anyone and anything. Also, a vampire bites a lead character. But don’t worry, none of that will actually matter in terms of the story nor will it ever be addressed again.

The rhyme and reason underlying any one of the scenes seems to be up to your own willingness to accept stupidity at face value. Honestly, I’d be shocked and amazed if anyone who hadn’t read the popular books upon which the movie is based could offer a reasonable plot point to plot point analysis after getting through this genuine nightmare. It is a near impossibility because nothing is ever allowed to breathe; it just charges along completely blind to the wreckage that it calls narrative.

For his part, Zwart can’t even handle the most commonplace of arcs. He chugs along letting the plot holes blow bigger and bigger. Had I been as apparently drunken as the people OKing this 2-hour-(plus!!) brain rape, it probably wouldn’t have been so bad. As it is, I’m already eager to slam it with the title of “Worst Movie of the Year.”

Although Collins (Mirror Mirror, Abduction) is a far cry from good, she does manage to escape more unscathed than her co-stars, who are wholly terrible. The broodingly gaunt Jamie Campbell Bower as Jace mistakes duckface for acting as Kevin Zegers‘s moody Alec is a simple shade of angst, fearfully meek in personifying homosexuality within a family-friendly environment. But none compare to the appallingly untalented Godfrey Gao, a minor character whose limited presence sucks the air right out of the scene. Casting folly notwithstanding, Gao serves as his own executioner. In his debut picture, he’s just acted his way out of a career.

Perhaps this unkempt company isn’t quite to blame though considering the script doesn’t seem to allow for any semblance of good acting, as most of the scripted lines are expository reports rather than genuine colloquial speech. With her debut screenwriting credit, Jessica Postigo has chalked up character motivation as flimsy as toothpicks, bending with the shift of the wind, which share the one-time-use disposable trait. Each and every action and reaction is about as thought through as the choice to sneeze or not. But still the thing sputters along, weaving a miscalculated web of romance, all of which by film’s end wind up being creepy, incestuous or homophobic.

While not shoehorning in love triangles until the skin-tight leather seams are about to burst, Zwart tries to usher in a level of self-awareness that escapes him and his performers. While trying to buddy up to the fan base and poke fun at the film, Zwart is having his cake and eating it too. But this cake is actually a grave, and he’s digging it deeper by the second. Even though it boasts an impressive amount of “laugh at us, not with us” lines, nothing is nearly as satisfying as the long awaited breath of relief when this invasive clunker has finally run its course.

Within the genre norms of trying to razzle-dazzle preteens and generally younger audiences, the film somehow manages to miss yet again. It’s impossible to reconcile the film’s darker, near grotesque creature designs with the flowery teen-sheen of the character relations but they’re all sharing the screen in their misfitted glory. As Zwart turgidly shovels plot points and familiar character beats into a witch’s brew of genre cliches, the only spell he ends up casting is a sleeping spell. Sadly those do not exist in the real world, so parents – be sure to bring along a double dose of Ambien. 

To return to the initial analogy, Zwart’s teenaged musings can really only be compared to the unwelcome discomfort we experience sitting in a dentist’s chair, jaw braced and teeth probed. Mortal Instruments is a grin-and-bear-it slog so relentless in its awful tendencies that the result is a special kind of agitating. As if untrained interns were solely responsible for the shaggy writing and Julienne-chopped editing, the film tries to substitute genuine craft with a stale pump of out-of-date laughing gas and a slopjob of visual flair that doesn’t even hold up to post-2000 standards. In a word, it’s absolutely dreadful…the brand of active, egregious dreadful that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

F