Clayface Review: It's Darkman in the DCU, and It Is Not a Horror Movie

DC Studios has spent six months calling Clayface a horror film, and it isn't one. Not by any stretch. Clayface just made Darkman a DC movie, and I think that's probably the best thing that could have happened to it.

I don't like eye trauma, and I don't like body horror. Every trailer has a scene of a guy on an airplane doing something to his own face that I didn't want to look at. I walked in anyway, and I had a really good time.

The Atlanta screening crowd applauded Clayface, with a caveat

I saw Clayface at a screening in Atlanta. It was my second screening ever and my first major one, and it was neat. Press got let in first, then the influencers. I brought my wife and Grandpa with me, and they matter here because they're my horror people.

The theater loved it, and the whole place applauded at the end. You have to remember that's what you get at a screening. People connected to the studio are in the room, and everybody wants to have a good time, so take the applause for what it is. Still, the energy in that theater was, I think, all over this thing, and that's not nothing.

Clayface is a superhero movie with dark tones, not horror

Let me say it plainly. This is a comic book movie. It's a superhero movie with dark tones. It has plenty of gore, plenty of blood, and there's nudity. It's R for a reason. But horror? No. Body horror, maybe, and even that gets mitigated by the way he morphs through things. It's more of a creep factor than anything. It's creepy. It's not scary.

I know people are going to walk in expecting scary, because that's what they were told. In the behind the scenes piece that came out on October 7, James Gunn said, "We're making a true horror film." Matt Reeves said in that same piece, "It's a horror thriller, but it's also a revenge story." Matt Reeves is right, and that second half of his sentence is the movie.

My wife is a horror fan. She went in expecting an overt horror movie. It was a little gory for her, and it wasn't the movie she was promised. So yes, they're mislabeling it, but for me it doesn't hurt the movie. I had a lot of fun with it, and considering I haven't had a good time at some movies lately, and I'm talking about Street Fighter, that means something.

The Clayface setup is Darkman

The story is a very cliché one. There's nothing original about it, and I mean that because I sat there and realized I'd seen this movie. It's Darkman. In Sam Raimi's 1990 film, Liam Neeson plays a scientist the mob leaves for dead with his face destroyed. He has a synthetic skin that can rebuild any face, but it doesn't hold. It breaks down, and he uses it to go after the men who did it to him, while the woman he loves has no idea what he's become.

Now look at the Clayface trailer. Matt Hagen is an actor on the rise. The mob takes his face. A doctor has a treatment that can rebuild it, and it doesn't stay put. That's the whole setup, and it's Darkman. This is the Darkman reboot everybody wanted and nobody realized they were going to get.

Here's the thing, though. At no point does it try to borrow that Sam Raimi feel. There are none of the Raimi zooms and none of the Raimi cartoon. It's doing things we've seen before, but it's doing them in such an original way, and I dig it.

The story is predictable, but the cast makes it work

It's predictable. Very predictable in some parts. Once you know who's who, you can almost map out who's going to go. It still works, because everybody's doing a good job.

Tom Rhys Harries is doing a wonderful job as Matt Hagen, and Naomi Ackie is doing well as the doctor. She's the most interesting thing the movie does with its marketing. The trailers sell her as somebody taking advantage of him. She's not. She's not a bad guy. If anybody is taking advantage of anybody in this movie, it's him, trying to get what he wants, and that's a very interesting aspect.

So it's Darkman. It's a man, his face, and the people who took it. And it lives in the DC universe, which I think is the part I didn't see coming.

Liverpool makes a convincing Gotham City, in daylight too

Speaking as a producer, the movie looks really good. It's filmed well. They shot it in Liverpool, and Liverpool looks like Gotham City. My wife is from Chicago, and she kept leaning over to tell me, "That's Chicago in a lot of scenes." It's a dead ringer.

It's the same Liverpool waterfront Matt Reeves shot The Batman on, so there's a consistency there. Reeves is a producer on this one. It could be name only; I don't know. Either way, I think you can feel it. But it's not one of those Gotham movies where everything happens at night. There's plenty of night material, sure, but there's also plenty of daytime. If this is what Gotham's tone is going to be, I'm good with it.

The airplane scene is one of the tensest in Clayface

Then there's the airplane scene from the trailers. That's the scene that introduces the eye trauma, and it's one of the tensest in the movie. Part of why it got me is that I just flew to New York for Comic Con.

In the scene, the flight attendant comes by and says, "Here, Mr. Hagen. I got you some more," and hands him a couple of those little Bacardi. My flight attendant brought me an extra Bacardi too. I'm not kidding. There was nothing trying to come out of anybody's face on my flight, but I sat there thinking, okay, this is authentic. That's the kind of thing that happens.

No big set pieces, and an ending that feels intimate

There are no big set pieces, or at least I can't put my finger on any. Even in The Batman you get those big moments, like Batman and Catwoman overlooking the red sky over Gotham. There's nothing like that here. They do put him on a talk show, which gave me shades of the first Joker. The second one was trash.

Production-wise, I think this achieves much of what the first Joker achieved, but at no point does it feel scaled up or big. Even the ending feels intimate. It feels like a stage, and I don't mean that in a bad way. There are going to be people who say you can feel the budget, and you can. I think that's good. This is a personal story. It doesn't feel like an HBO show; it feels like a movie.

It's a very intimate, very personal story of one man's revenge that crosses paths with Gotham City and the GCPD and never once tries to be bigger than it is. Would I have liked something big? Sure. Do I need it? No.

The effects are solid, with a few cartoony moments

The visual effects are good. It's a solid budget with good work. There are a few moments where it gets a little cartoony, and I'm talking Video Toaster cartoony.

There's one moment late in the movie, which I'm not naming until after opening day, where it looks like they turned on turbulent displacement in After Effects. Everything spikes up and then holds. I get it. A couple of moments have effects that look like 1992.

Clayface stands on its own and feels like James Gunn's DCU

I know the question is whether Batman is in it. I'm holding that for after release. What I'll say is that this movie stands on its own two feet, and I never once felt like it was waiting on anybody.

What I felt instead was the Penguin. I could see Oz living in this city. I could see him meeting with the same lowlife mob bosses. This absolutely belongs in the DCU. It's the first movie that feels like the James Gunn house style, the DC Comics house style. It doesn't jibe with Lanterns; it's a different beast. It feels like it belongs in the Peacemaker universe and the Creature Commandos universe. It isn't a Batman movie. It stands alone, and I'm okay with that.

My verdict on Clayface: 8 out of 10

Clayface has a lead doing wonderful work, a doctor the trailers got wrong in the best way, and a Gotham built out of Liverpool that I'd go back to in daylight. It has an airplane scene I didn't want to see and couldn't look away from, and it knows exactly how big it is. Against that, it's a story you've seen before if you've seen Darkman, it's predictable in places, a couple of effects moments look dated, and it carries a horror label it never earns.

I gave it an 8.5 walking out of the theater. Sitting with it, I'm leaning toward an 8, so Clayface lands at an 8 out of 10 for me. Grandpa loves body horror, and he was okay with it; he gave it a 7.5. My wife gives it a 7, and she'll be the first to tell you she penalized it because she walked in wanting a horror movie and this isn't one. They sold you a monster. They made a man.