At the Movies with James Phelan: Clayface has feet of clay
Actors dream of transformation and disappearing into a role. So, in this comic book adaptation, it’s ironic, fitting, and darkly humorous that the premise hinges on a handsome young actor, Matt Hagen, gaining the ability to literally become a man with a thousand faces.
The film opens with Matt (Tom Rhys Harries) on a high. His career is heating up, and on the back of a prestigious acting nomination, he visits his home city of Gotham to celebrate. However, an ill-advised dalliance with a mobster’s girlfriend means Matt wakes in a bed surrounded by the crime boss’s henchmen.
Under the kingpin’s instruction, a terrible vengeance is inflicted on Matt’s face. The mutilation takes everything from Matt. His looks. His career. And through wounding betrayal, those he trusted squander even the buffer of his money in a blink.
With shocking speed, Matt finds himself back in the squalor of the Gotham streets that he thought he had escaped. The film excels at depicting how hard and fast the fall is. A disfigured Matt is disowned and, as is often the way, driven by his desperation to extreme measures.
This means approaching a sympathetic Doctor Corr (Naomi Ackie), who is pioneering a risky skin-regeneration technology. This is music to Matt’s ears. Eager to return to his glory days, he impatiently overdoses on the nanobots and, for a bright, fleeting moment, his face returns to normal. But there are side effects; his skin can sag and droop at the most inopportune times.
At first, the unstable changes seem linked to Matt’s mood. Some of the imagery here is startling. Often his entire visage is wiped into a featureless face. Like a flesh-wrapped head devoid of detail. It’s a visual worthy of David Lynch, or it could have sprung straight from Guillermo Del Toro's imagination.
One exceptional scene brilliantly sells this film. It formed the backbone of the trailer: Matt innocently wipes his eyes on a flight. This common everyday action nearly seals Matt’s eyes shut. Racing to the bathroom, Matt battles to literally keep his eyes open.
Locked in a shuddering toilet cubicle in a plane rocked by turbulence, Matt considers impromptu ocular surgery with a pair of small scissors. And who could blame him if he had a tremor in his hands? This jittery nerve-jangling sequence has ingredients that Hitchcock would have been proud of.
Even if, when viewed in its entirety, I discovered that my eyes were bigger than my stomach when it came to watching this harrowing scene in full. So, despite being a fan of the setup and all the fears and phobias it stirred, I had to look away.
If you’ve twigged that the Gotham setting comes from D.C. comics, you might expect a cameo from the Batmen or Supermen of this world, but this version of the traditionally crime-infested metropolis barely mentions anyone famous or infamous. This film is a tightly budgeted effort to elevate a lower-tier villain from the caped crusader’s gallery of rogues into a lead role. I have no issue with the sensible finances, but the film is so standalone that it lacks any connective tissue to the wider D.C. universe.
Shot in Liverpool with a predominantly local cast, both elements are problematic in the end. With a Welsh actor in the lead role, most of the baddies are also British. Hence the sense of actors overly concentrating on their faux American accents is detectable. No one is outrageously bad, but there’s an accumulative breach of the illusion that we’re in an American city. And for the Scouse locations, there seems to be little special-effects investment in digitally expanding the city’s skyline to convincingly double for Gotham.
Story-wise, there is too much emphasis on Matt’s post-attack torment and turmoil. The plot doesn’t get to Clayface’s ability to morph into other people's identities until very late in the day. The film excessively stretches out his struggle with controlling his superpower. And then gives him mastery of it far too quickly.
The film climaxes with a sustained mug-swapping incursion into the mob villain’s empire, which is technically exciting. But by then, Matt is a villain himself.
It’s certainly not a dead loss for entertainment, but sadly, I found ‘Clayface’ has feet of clay, too.
