“Clayface” is a Cheap Thrill and Little More (Movie Review)

There’s so much potential in the idea of taking a well-established comic book villain and putting them at the center of their own story. This is by no means breaking news; it’s the kind of thing comic book writers have been doing for decades. In many ways, the vast majority of these villain origin stories owe something, at least in theory, to Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, which served as a rumination on how an antagonist like the Joker might have been forged.

And yet, so many efforts to bring such stories to the screen have had baffling results. Infamously, Sony spent years attempting to spin off various Spider-Man-adjacent characters into their own franchises, such as Venom, Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter, with often disastrous results. Outside of that, there’s also the one-two punch of Todd Phillips’ Joker films, the first of which won Oscars and the second of which was panned by critics and audiences alike. It’s into this strange gaggle of cinematic attempts at capitalizing on what should be a pretty simple idea that James Watkins’ Clayface is now welcomed.

Backed by James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DC Studios as an official entry in the larger DCU, Clayface takes a lower-level Batman villain and gives him the full-blown origin movie treatment. But the question is: does it work?

TOP FIVE THINGS ABOUT “CLAYFACE”

5. Earning the R-Rating

When the marketing for Clayface started and seemed to be earnestly positioning the film as a horror title, with everything from its release date to its R-rating seeming to confirm those intentions, to say I was skeptical would be an understatement. This has very much become part of the game in recent years when it comes to comic book movies. It isn’t enough to say there’s a new Captain America movie coming out; the marketing has to allege that it’s actually a gritty political thriller, even if the movie itself is very much not. This is inherently very funny to me, and I assumed the same would probably be true of Clayface and its status as a horror film.

But to Clayface’s credit, it is a full-blown horror film, with the guts to really swing for some onscreen gore and gross-out gags that earn that R-rating.

4. The Story is Middling

The inception of Clayface as a movie stems from a meeting between James Gunn and horror aficionado Mike Flanagan, wherein the latter pitched the former some variation of this movie. Gunn was apparently enormously excited about the project, and Flanagan went off to write the script. However, somewhere along the way, things got a bit muddied in translation. The film’s script, as it stands, is credited to both Flanagan and Hossein Amini, who performed rewrites just before and during production.

This is very abnormal for Flanagan, who had never written a film he didn’t direct prior to this, and the prospect of bringing someone in to rewrite the script that served as the catalyst for the whole film strikes me as strange. It’s difficult to know for certain where one creative’s contributions end and the next’s begin, but it’s fair to say that Clayface’s overall story is a bit middling and mild.

The tale of an actor offending a mob boss, having his face cut up by that mob boss, and then inadvertently gaining supernatural abilities and subsequently exacting revenge is not exactly innovative or fresh. While there are moments when the film really exceeds these quaint trappings, anytime the story returns to this primary plot, it all feels very on-rails and rote.

3. Failing to Engage

If you’re making a film about an actor who gets physically disfigured and then gains the ability to literally shapeshift into anyone through performance, I feel like it’s kind of mandatory that you at least somewhat engage with the inherent metatextual level of that idea. But aside from some cutesy references to Hagen’s life as a movie star prior to his disfigurement and a few gags throughout, the vast majority of the film steadfastly refuses to engage with this idea on any level.

It feels like this is something that could have been present in earlier drafts, because there are some interesting motifs relating to the ways in which Hagen’s onscreen and real-life personas are being blended together through this tragedy. But in the film as it stands, all of that is pushed to the periphery, and you really have to go digging for it, which is a shame.

2. An Actual Villain

Credit where credit is due: Matt Hagen, the man who becomes Clayface in Clayface, is an actual villain. That shouldn’t be such a rarity, but it is. All of Sony’s villain-centric spinoffs (Every. Single. One.) give the alleged villain at their center an antagonist of their own to spar against who is even more evil, making them look heroic by comparison. This misunderstands the whole point of even bothering to make one of these films, and to Clayface’s credit, it understands that it is ultimately a tragic film about a man’s descent into villainy.

Nowhere does this pay off more than in the film’s final moments, when Clayface elects to end with a big emotional catharsis rather than an action set piece and is all the better for it. Also, special credit goes to the final shot, which genuinely does feel like a comic book panel brought to cinematic life.

1. Tom Rhys Harries’ Performance

All in all, I had mixed feelings about Clayface. I think I liked it more than I anticipated going in, even with its shortcomings, and a huge part of that was Tom Rhys Harries as the titular character. Harries has a very left-of-center look and performance style that really worked for this film, cutting through some of the more stock-standard elements and imbuing them with a unique kind of verve. The actor is equal parts young Shea Whigham and Hayden Christensen, and that all just really worked for me. It also doesn’t hurt that Naomi Ackie is tremendous opposite him with what little she is given to do, and their very Phantom of the Opera-esque romance plays well.

RGM GRADE

(C+)

Overall, Clayface is a solid villain-centric comic book movie that embraces horror to its benefit. I would have loved to have been a bit more surprised by it or for it to have taken bolder swings, but as it stands, Clayface is perfectly fine.