Clayface is mostly effective as a comic book-flavored body horror offering
Clayface is a movie that works and doesn’t work at the same time.
On one hand, it’s a pretty entertaining body horror/anti-superhero movie with a lot of inventive kills and some occasionally impressive special effects. It’s gross and gory and has way more blood in it than you’d ever expect from an official DC Cinematic Universe entry and if that’s all you’re looking for at the cinema, Clayface ought to satisfy you.
Alas, if you’re looking for something a little deeper, I’m afraid Clayface is bound to disappoint you.
It’s not exactly a new concept for a monster movie. We’ve got Tom Rhys Harries playing a movie star who runs afoul of a drug cartel kingpin, so naturally, his comeuppance is getting his Hollywood good lucks shred to ribbons with a pocket knife. From there the movie takes a very iffy turn by making Tom’s character (canonically named Matt Hagen) an innocent victim of a very Me Too-like movement. You kinda have to question the director’s decision to throw that into the mix, especially amidst so many sexual assault scandals still plaguing the headlines. In a movie featuring exploded heads and multiple eyeball slicing scenes, that little element of the picture is probably its most unsavory feature.
So Hagen exiles himself from the movie business until he hooks up with a scientist working on some kind of miracle nano-technology skin regrowth treatment. Hey, what do you know, it works. Unfortunately, it only works for a few hours at a time, then Matt’s face starts turning into melted Milk Duds again. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because we already saw this on the silver screen … in Sam Raimi’s Darkman from 1990.
From there the movie essentially becomes a revenge thriller, with Hagen tracking down all of the people who wronged him and exacting gory, CGI-heavy vengeance. There are some pretty good sequences here, including one where Matt suffocates a one-time friend in the Play-Doh like recessed of his chest cavities. Then, there are some shots that aren’t effective at all, like the part where Matt tries to bleed the face off a mob boss. Yes, “bleed the face off” is the only way to accurately describe it — needless to say, the CGI isn’t terribly convincing there.
There are two enormous missteps with the plot. First, they actually try to turn Hagen’s relationship with scientist wunderkind Naomi Ackie into a real love story, but these two actors have about as much chemistry as a dead car battery. You can obviously see where they were trying to go all Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis in The Fly on us, but it doesn’t work here at all. Secondly, the movie takes way too long for Hagen to “choose a side,” so to speak. Is he revenge-obsessed maniac or an outright sociopathic monster who wants existential revenge on the entire world? It’s a SLOOOWWWW crawl from point A to point B, and by the time Hagen picks a path, it’s so abrupt that it doesn’t really impact you on any real emotional level. You’re just like “well, that’s one way to end a movie” and it’s time to start jangling your car keys and move it to the exits.
The ensemble cast is pretty boring and the movie never really works as a true horror movie. It feels like a superhero movie, albeit one headed in the reverse direction. The director may have been aiming for some Brian DePalma style psycho-drama, but it falls short. You could even say the same about the body horror elements of the movie; it takes a lot more than exposed viscera and long, lingering shots of nose cartilage extractions to make a proper David Cronenberg tribute, guys.
So yeah, I’m pretty conflicted on this one. What it does very well is the formulaic “monster on the loose” stuff, to the point you kinda wish that was the entire movie. If you’re going to do a character portrait, you have to give us a character who is actually interesting and nuanced. And I’m afraid Hagen is too one-dimensional to relate to or sympathize with.
The material is there and the best parts of Clayface are pretty entertaining (and nauseating, to boot.) But the actual drama is pretty ho-hum and the pacing is far too slow for its own good. It’s a better movie than any of the Spider-Man spinoffs (read, Morbius and Kraven), but it pales in comparison to The Joker, or even the Venom movies (which, in a weird way, kinda does the same material as Clayface, only more enjoyably and sure-handed.)
You can give the filmmakers credit for doing something very different with a big-name property. It’s an R-rated horror movie for a reason, and it’s got some truly unnerving moments in it from time to time. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make you care for any of the trauma or bloodshed — without a real protagonist in the movie, it’s kind of a moot point. I’m not saying Batman and Robin should’ve swooped down in the third act to make Clayface a more interesting movie, but I’m not *not saying* it, either.
The somewhat mediocre box office returns casts doubts as to whether we’ll get a Clayface sequel (or perhaps any other Bat-villian spinoffs.) Ultimately, it’s a movie that falters because it strays too far away from what made the character so fascinating and tragic in the old Batman: The Animates Series run. There’s a lot of blood and fury, but where’s the pathos?
It’s hard to give Clayface an honest recommendation, but I don’t think you can really condemn it that much. It tries and it usually works, at least when it’s playing to the lowest common denominator. It’s simply a film that stomps on its own toes by taking too long to get to the good stuff and bogging everything down with too many subplots nobody in the audience gives a damn about. It’s a movie about an evil mud monster eating everybody in Gotham City — so shouldn’t it actually be about an evil mud monster eating everybody in Gotham City?
