Late in James Watkins’ DCU film “Clayface,” the titular protagonist-turned-future-Batman-villain Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) says: “It’s just skin, such a small part of who we are.”
If only he’d heeded this wisdom about an hour and a half earlier in the film, he could have saved himself–and several other characters–a lot of trouble.
Clayface
Director: James Watkins
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3.5/5
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2.5/5
The film, from a script by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, opens with Hagen as the hottest rising star in the DCU’s version of Hollywood (Coast City, notably the home of Green Lantern Hal Jordan, but don’t worry about missing any “Lanterns” easter eggs, there aren’t any). He arrives on set for his latest blockbuster to learn he has just been nominated for an Oscar for his previous effort.
Hagen and his longtime bestie, fellow actor Corey (Joshua James), return to their hometown of Gotham City to celebrate, and a series of escalating bad decisions lead to Hagen waking up in bed with Mia Torrez, the girlfriend of Gotham’s most notorious mobster, Markos Szabo (David Dencik).
Szabo and his goons respond to Hagen’s perceived slight by taking away something precious to him: His good looks. The sequence is the first of the film’s many assaults against the squeamish in the audience, as the camera lingers luridly on every bloody moment.
Multiple botched reconstructive surgeries, one public smear campaign and a failed civil suit later, Hagen is left horrifically scarred, broke, utterly alone and completely unable to move on with his life in a squalid, roach-infested Gotham apartment.
He finds a glimmer of hope in Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), a medical researcher on the verge of losing her funding. Hagan convinces her to perform an unsanctioned human trial of her regenerative, AI-powered nanobots.
The procedure is a complete success, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Just kidding.
Hagan’s perfect new face melts and mutates when he becomes emotionally agitated–a state he can’t avoid as he puts his new shapeshifting mud-man powers to grisly use on a quest for revenge against all who have wronged him.
“Clayface” milks equal horror out of Hagen’s body transformations, and the violent purposes he puts them to. One memorable scene involves sealing eyelids, nail scissors and an airplane bathroom amid extreme turbulence. Another features Hagan putting his ability to retract his own bled blood back into his body to a violent end.
Despite its setting in James Gunn’s DCU, “Clayface” owes more to cinematic history than it does to any Batman comic book in particular. His life story features stray elements from multiple different incarnations of his comic book counterpart (and perhaps has the most in common with the version of Matt Hagen from “Batman: The Animated Series”), but is far more evocative of B-movies such as Sam Raimi’s “Darkman,” David Cronenberg’s version of “The Fly” and the Universal monster movies of old.
Don’t expect much in the way of comic book references or easter eggs, there isn’t so much as a “Wayne Enterprises” sign in all of Gotham City.
In fact, Watson’s Gotham City eschews the architectural character of its incarnations from the films of Christopher Nolan, Tim Burton, Matt Reeves and even Joel Schumacher in favor of film noir-ish back alleys with dim red lighting. While almost certainly attributable to the lower budget of “Clayface,” Watson’s direction turns this into a strength, leaning away from traditional comic book movie aesthetics and into the classic monster movie motif.
The biggest weakness of “Clayface” is in its thematic confusion. Experiencing Hagen’s descent into madness from the outside looking in, the audience is left guessing as to exactly what it is that pushed his psyche to the point of breaking. Was it the simple act of losing the face he had defined himself by? Was it finding betrayal in every corner of his life? Was it the influence of the nanobots’ AI on his own mind? Or are the answers in Hagen’s own past, with violent acts that were only vaguely alluded to?
Leaving these and other questions unanswered makes for interesting topics of discussion and introspection for the audience, but leaves us without a satisfying answer for a far more important question: What, exactly, are we to take away from this story?
“Clayface” is an imperfect, but fun entry in the DCU, and may prove to be a harbinger of what to expect as “super hero fatigue” (whether or not that’s actually a real thing) leads studios to attempt to do something different with their wealth of comic book-based IP. You can bet big bucks (this is not a plug for prediction markets, all my homies hate prediction markets) that the studio executives at Sony are paying attention to what “Clayface” did right that they did so horribly wrong with their Spider-Man spin-off films that range from dismal (“Morbius”) to forgettable (“Kraven the Hunter”).
About the author:
Ben Hooper would simply use Clayface’s powers to become the greatest actor the world has ever seen, and wouldn’t even go the least bit insane or revenge-obsessed. He definitely wouldn’t turn into a gross mud man. He’s just built different.
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