Clayface review: Tom Rhys Harries carries a DCU film of wasted potential

I came away from Clayface with mixed feelings. Tom Rhys Harries is phenomenal as Matt Hagen and is by far the best part of the movie, but the side characters, the dropped threads and a lack of real horror keep it from being great. To me, Clayface was okay, and I think this needed to be a great film.

The next chapter in the DCU saga leads into the latter part of Gods and Monsters. It follows Matt Hagen on a twisted tale of revenge after mobsters cut up his face. I know this is a hard one to discuss with nuance, because people did not react well to a tweet I put out.

Tom Rhys Harries carries Clayface as Matt Hagen

We meet Matt as a big star in Coast City. That's the home of Hal Jordan, and it got a mention in Lanterns, so it's a nice lead in. Matt is up for Oscar nominations and seems to be having the time of his life. Among the films he's competing with are One Bad Day and No Man's Land, which DC fans will know are based on Batman graphic novels.

The story focuses on the idea from the former: a person only needs one bad day to become the Joker. That plays out when Matt returns to Gotham and spends the night with a woman named Mia Torres.

From the start, Tom Rhys Harries carries the picture. He's phenomenal throughout and excels beyond the material. He bounces about perfectly when it comes to tone, moving from a sympathetic man at the end of his rope, to a lovable, affable guy, to someone with all the power in the world who's ready to use it and be corrupted by it. I definitely think he has a bright future ahead of him.

The Clayface mobsters and corrupt cops feel like a step down

Where I felt the movie fell flat was in most of the side characters, especially the mobsters. The Batman and Penguin showed what you can do with complex characters who ooze evil in a subtle way. These guys feel like a step down. I like David Dencik, who plays the main mobster. I think he's great in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and I know he gets hate for No Time to Die, but I like him there too. He sells himself as a mobster here, but the dialogue felt Sony level to me, and as good as he is, he's only playing to that level of writing.

The crime family's leader happens to be Mia's boyfriend. Matt brushes this off at the club in all his arrogance, and the boss leaves him with a mark he won't ever forget. The boss even admits to killing Matt's dad when Matt was younger. It's cartoonish, and the worst thing is it didn't need to be in the film. Matt never sets out to avenge his dad and never brings it up again. I think they dropped the ball there.

Matt recovers as a broken shell of the man he once was. Because of the corruption in Gotham, he can't right the wrongs. He's beaten in court, and lies spread about him because the boss buys off witnesses and has Matt's pals and partners in his pocket. I think the police corruption is another place the film stumbles. There isn't much depth to the corrupt officers. In The Batman, we see how crooked cops manipulate the system and everyone around them. Here, it's a line like "Hey, that's a nice watch," and the cop is obviously corrupt. He shows up from time to time, then gets dropped and doesn't come back after around the hour mark.

Clayface feels like it lost material in the edit

The film keeps dropping the ball. Matt's agent, who he argues with at the premiere, isn't in the film before or after that scene, so why include a character who doesn't add anything?

There's also a cameo by Aaron Paul as Matt's dad, but he's only in a split second shot. Because of that, I couldn't help thinking there was probably a flashback scene on the cutting room floor where Paul got to really portray the father. The film touches on how he was abusive and made Matt's life hell, but I think it could have been a great case of show, don't tell. Looking at the IMDb cast list, there's an actor credited as a young Matt Hagen who isn't in the movie, so there was definitely some stuff cut.

Dr. Caitlin and the love story add to Clayface for me

At his wit's end, Matt is living in the Narrows, first introduced in Batman Begins and since then a staple of Gotham as the worst of the worst. There he comes across a radical new nanotechnology treatment that could potentially heal him. It's led by Dr. Caitlin, who has been shunned by the science world while her partner takes her work and leaves her in the dirt. That makes a nice parallel to Matt, and I think the actress playing her is really strong in the film.

I've seen reviews saying the love plot felt forced, but I think it added to the movie. It's important for Matt to stop focusing on his career and attach to something in his personal life, and him falling in love with her makes the movie feel more personal. It creates a love triangle, with Caitlin stuck between her patient and her fiance, John, one of the only good cops in Gotham.

We learn Caitlin's brother died from Huntington's disease, which in the comics is what Mr. Freeze's wife, Nora, suffers from. That's also a big part of Batman & Robin, where it was changed to MacGregor's syndrome and Alfred suffers from it. Caitlin can't do human trials, but Matt puts himself forward and signs away everything.

The airplane and nightclub scenes are the Clayface standouts

After the trials, Matt's face is fixed and everything seems to be coming up Milhouse. But his face starts to melt from time to time, and he gets addicted to the nanotech to keep things in check. The changes are brought on by his emotional spiraling, and we get a great scene on an airplane. I was tensing up when he was cutting through his eyelids. That and the later club scene are the two standout parts of the movie for me.

He realizes Caitlin grounds him and becomes his emotional anchor. His face keeps getting worse, though, and he goes overboard and injects the entire substance into his face. That takes his abilities to the next step. His skin and blood cells give him healing abilities, and anything cut off or removed makes its way back to him. He can also change how he looks, and he uses that to impersonate those who wronged him and fool witnesses while John follows the case.

This is the real heart of the movie. There are obvious nods to The Godfather, and the scene with the best friend who betrayed him is a great moment for Tom to play up how heartbroken this guy feels. He even takes on the friend's appearance to taunt Mia, who is working as an actress in the film.

I think Clayface is closer to Venom with an R rating than horror

It's stuff like this where the movie soars, but I don't think it goes far enough. It's labeled as a DC horror movie, but I think it's more along the lines of Venom with an R rating, in the same way you might call Joker a horror movie. There are creative kills and they do a lot with body horror, but they don't push it to the level where I'd look back in many Halloweens to come and say, "Ooh, let's put on Clayface tonight, the classic horror."

I did find the revenge plot satisfying. After the boss sends his goons to get Caitlin, Matt takes one of their forms and infiltrates the nightclub where he first met Mia. The quick cuts as they swap actors while Matt changes shape are seamless. I'd love to see these moments in slow motion to spot the stitching, but the actors all remain in the exact same place, so it's difficult to tell.

The movie has great effects, and considering its small budget, they make the most of it, outside of how Clayface himself looks. There are build ups like a big smiley face drawn on a window and Hagen's shadow beating henchmen with a giant spiked hand. He kills Mia, then cuts the boss's face into the same scars he was given. He bleeds into the boss's face, and the particles pull themselves back together through his pores and orifices. It's a solid death, and I think it makes the most of the concept.

The Clayface climax echoes The Fly

The investigation closes in. After Matt professes his love to Caitlin, and with it clearly being him behind the crimes, John confronts him at his apartment, and Matt denies everything. Caitlin returns home after going over Matt's files and confesses the truth to her fiance, who reveals himself to be Matt in disguise as she discovers John's body. It feels akin to The Fly, and considering how much the movie draws from it, I thought this might be where they'd take the final showdown.

Instead, Caitlin shocks Matt with a taser, and he begs for death as she activates a kill switch that fries the nano machines in his body. That sends him to a seemingly watery grave in the sewers, but a guy made of clay is very hard to kill.

The final Clayface look is a muddled middle ground

I think the final look of Clayface is something people will go back and forth on. He's a big blob of a man, which technically is what Clayface is, but they also keep his human face in there so Tom's performance can come through. I understand that. I think they probably created countless versions, some closer to the classic comics look and others more human, like a man made out of mud. I think this is probably the middle ground they settled on, and because of that it feels muddled, for lack of a better word. It wasn't terrible for me, but I know it's going to be a big point of contention.

Surf Dracula has become a big talking point in the wake of Lanterns. It's built off a tweet saying that back in the day, a show called Surf Dracula would show Dracula surfing every week, whereas now things get teased out until the final scene has Dracula picking up the surfboard. That criticism was levied heavily against Lanterns, but I understand why they did it there and here.

The Clayface ending traps Matt Hagen in a fantasy

With Hagen seemingly gone, Caitlin tries to get back to her regular life, but because Matt can look like anyone, she keeps scanning crowds and wondering if it's him. She gives change to a homeless man, and we follow him to the sewers, where he changes into Matt in the mirror. Caitlin joins him to spend her life with him, and they share an intimate moment, until we pull out to see she's merely a part of Matt, performing a fantasy. It plays on him morphing into her earlier while asleep.

He's trapped in a well of misery, fantasizing about a life he'll never have. Matt says in the film that he acts because it's easier than being him, and putting on someone else's face lets him dissociate from himself. Now he's stuck in that fantasy, unable to accept who he is, living beneath Gotham waiting to make his move.

There was no post credits scene at the Cineworld secret screening I attended, which is nearly always the wide release version, though I've seen cases where a scene turned up later. We do know this version of the character continues into Creature Commandos, where he was seemingly killed, but James Gunn clarified that the reports of Clayface's death have been greatly exaggerated. He can separate and come together, so the character likely survives. Whether they do more with him, we'll have to see, but I'm not sure I'm dying to see a sequel.

Mike Flanagan's distance from Clayface shows

I'm a massive fan of Mike Flanagan, so I was excited when I heard he was writing the script. However, he has distanced himself from the project and said they took his script and changed some stuff, and that he's not really sure where things have gone. I think you can feel that. Many things don't get developed, and even the Rob Brydon chat show at the start, which feels like it's setting up something big like the ending of Joker, is left by the wayside.

Comparing it to Joker shows where a supervillain origin succeeds where this fails. There, the chat show is teased as Joker's fantasy, and when he finally goes on it and it goes horribly wrong, it sends him spiraling to murder. Here, the chat show happens for real first, then reappears as a fantasy that doesn't go anywhere. Seeing this made me realize how important characters like Penny were to Joker, and nothing here is performed or written to that level. As good as the leads are, the rest of the material lets things down. If you're a casual fan, I think you'd probably have a better time revisiting The Fly, because it does everything Clayface does on a much better level.

Clayface is probably my favorite of the first three DCU films, but not a home run

As the third DCU film, I thought Superman was okay, I didn't enjoy Supergirl, and I think this is okay too, probably my favorite of the three. But I don't think anything here is going to change the genre the way several other DC films have. There's a reason Christopher Nolan has become the biggest director in Hollywood, and it's wild to me that we were getting that level of DC movie 15 years ago and this is the level now.

Maybe I'm too old and cynical, but I can't see this being a film people look back on as a milestone, which DC needs to be close to competing with Marvel. They needed a home run. Marvel is probably going to do two two billion dollar movies this year, and after Supergirl bombed as badly as it did, I think DC Studios needs big wins. I'm not sure this is it.

The DC fan discourse has become tiring

I'm trying to be balanced, and I know I'll get stick for this. After I posted my reaction on Twitter, DC accounts claimed I made a racist review of Lanterns episode three and criticized it as race bait. In reality, I said it was one of the best hours in the DCU and never brought up race baiting. After seeing the backlash to Lanterns, I'd even started wondering if critics had a point, like Sheriff Carrie facing no consequences, or John stealing the ring off a corpse. I expected people to think I was an idiot for praising it, but instead people made up that I hated it.

One person dug up an old tweet where I joked about the Rebel Moon trailer looking like Zack Snyder had a baby with Zack Snyder. To me, attaching your personality to a brand, deciding everything will be good before seeing it, then accusing others of bias when they don't like it is the worst confirmation bias and a cult like mentality. When people argue with the perception of your opinion, calling you a shill paid by Marvel or DC instead of engaging, it's impossible to talk about this stuff. I know it's a very small group, and I'm open to hearing opinions on the film as long as they're civil.

Clayface was okay, and that may not be enough for the DCU

Clayface had the potential to be great, but some things held it back. I wanted it to show what the DC monster side of chapter one would do, but if the rest follows these lines, I think we'll end up with a slightly better version of Sony's Spider-Man villain movies without Spider-Man, and I'm not sure how that helps win ground back from Marvel. It reminded me of Kevin Feige's process of seeing a cut and coming back with notes to fix things, and it made me realize he must be a visionary, because these projects haven't had that level of audience awareness. Even the Gorilla Grodd project coming up makes me ask if it's the right choice.

Because I didn't like the last two films, I was more on board for liking this one. I thought, "Well, I can't hate three films in a row." And no, I thought it was okay. It just left a lot to be desired.