A desperate man agrees to experimental surgery and wakes up with a superhero franchise where his face used to be. Deadpool. Clayface. I’m starting to suspect Hollywood’s plastic surgeons waive their fees if you let them keep final cut.
But Nip/Fuck-it here we go.
Our not-a-hero is Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), a Gotham player whose ongoing escape from the city’s shadier corners hinges on him remaining unusually handsome. He’s gifted, grateful-ish, and flawed in only those instantly forgivable ways. Unfortunately, his latest adorable little misstep involves sleeping with a mobster’s girlfriend (Joana Ribeiro). The mobster (David Dencik) responds by sending his enforcers to carve up the rising star’s moneymaker like it’s tonight’s special at Benihana.
Understandably unhappy with this career setback, Matt goes looking for a doctor who considers desperation a form of informed consent. Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie) offers an experimental treatment, a route back to his old life, and enough romantic chemistry to further impair his judgment. The medical miracle does what it’s supposed to do in revitalizing his face. Then it keeps renovating.
These overachieving side effects come to a head when Matt is on an airplane, hitting with the force of four weed gummies he was sure hadn’t kicked in. Skin has grown over his eyes, and he needs to cut himself some eyeholes while the turbulence makes a compelling argument for doing that at his arrival airport. It’s where the movie hits its best balance of gross and thrilling. You want him to cut his face open, you want him to stop cutting his face open, and you would appreciate it if the fucking plane would hold still. The scene gets suspense, disgust, and absurdity working together so well that you briefly start wondering whether this is the Halloween movie of the year.
Once the side effects have had time to re-brand as superpowers, Matt realizes it’s time for a revenge tour. His recovery plan now involves making sure everybody else needs surgery too. His changing body supplies the originality the plot doesn’t, even if you can generally see where he’s headed before he finishes rearranging himself to get there.
The usual bummers follow. Revenge feels good, then there’s too much of a good thing, and yada yada live long enough to see yourself become the villain. There’s some tragic business in there about what Matt has lost, but the movie is better at making him come apart physically than it is at making us do so emotionally. Fortunately, its willingness to be funny and fucking ridiculous keeps any long, boring moral about revenge from getting in the way of the goddamn revenge.
By the end, an unexpected peculiarity of the thing is how desperate the branding surrounding the film is for you to know that it’s part of the DC Universe. I get that the origins of this story do in fact emanate from the same bucket of IP, but I can’t see why the fuck that matters to what Clayface is trying to do here, which is gloriously not much. Nothing about its gross-out laughs gets better because Batman might be somewhere down the street. The film has the most room to call itself successful if we decide it’s a Halloween movie—B-movie mayhem, flashy scares, gross-outs, and enough laughs to let everyone unclench now and then.
Nobody decorates the front yard with a cancer diagnosis or any other manner of literally scary shit. We anthropomorphize bedsheets into Casper because, for one crisp fall night each year, even death is fun at parties.
The movie makes a fun party guest on its own. The need to place it all in the right universe just turns Clayface into the guy who keeps explaining his costume.
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