Someone rather bluntly popped up on X recently to ask Hollywood writer-producer James Gunn a pointed — and here sanitized — question: “Who asked for a ‘Clayface’ movie??”
Tom Rhys Harries stars as Matt Hagen, a pretty-boy rising actor whose long road from poverty finally nets him an Oscar nomination and industry respect. Cue celebratory drinks at a nightclub. It works and the movie’s over. No, no, of course not. The serum does work but only temporarily — leaving Hagen’s face droopier than after a visit to the orthodontist — and Corr has to find a way to stabilize the experiment. All the while, it’s a biting satire of Hollywood and its obsession with beauty, led by an actor playing an actor, who is complimented on being a chameleon. The stem cells injected into his face are described as Method actors and a TV talk-show host offers a foreshadowing question: “There’s so many of you. It must be hard to find the real Matt Hagen. The last third of the movie gets as unstable as the serum, with Hagen weirdly able to take on anyone’s identity and pass as them if he acts well enough. The scientist’s boyfriend also happens to be a homicide detective and, wouldn’t you know it, he gets assigned to whoever is slaughtering people linked to Matt Hagen. The ultimate showdown, naturally, happens at, you guessed it, a nightclub. You’ll get over it. There’s more than enough going on.
“Clayface” then shoots along on twin rails — the race to harness this technology and our hero’s bloodthirsty revenge stampede. “This business is all surface,” Hagen is told by an agent who dropped him. One grumble during a recent preview is that the movie is totally Batman-less, with only vague references to the Caped Crusader, like Kane’s Candy Store named after “Batman” co-creator Bob Kane.
