I think if you want to see this, you probably have already, so we’ll do spoilers all the way through for this one. Or I will, at least. You’ll be reading this. Or you won’t. Anyway.

Clayface (2026) stars Tom Rhys Harries, Naomi Ackie, Max Minghella, Joshua James, Eddie Marsan, Nancy Carroll, Joana Ribeiro, David Dencik, Corey Johnson, and Rob Brydon. It was directed by James Watkins and written by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini.

Quick Plot Rundown –
So there’s an actor. His name is Matt Hagen. Technically it shouldn’t be. Because the actor Clayface in the comics is Basil Karlo, and Matt Hagen was apparently a treasure hunter originally? Though I’m not sure how, it took until just now for me to realize that it’s 2026, and nobody is named Basil anymore. Anyway, Matt Hagen is a beloved actor. It’s not entirely clear how long he’s been doing this. It’s a bit surprising that he’s nominated for an Oscar. His acting would be pretty undeniable for him to be nominated at this age. So he’s a beloved actor on the up and up. He climbed his way to the top from poverty in the Narrows, which is the shittiest part of Gotham. His dad was a known criminal and his mom died when he was very young.

One day he makes the mistake of sleeping with a generic Gotham mobster’s girlfriend. At the club he owns, I believe. And the next morning, the Gotham mobster, along with his goons, (Who all probably auditioned to be in The Penguin) carve up his face. And it’s incredibly gruesome. And you can see the mobster’s girlfriends breasts, because it’s a rated R movie. After the face carving, Matt’s life is systematically taken apart, piece by piece. His lawyer, his agent, his best friend, all of them betray him, in the end. And he meets this Doctor lady from the television who has created sentient skin cells or something.

She helps him reshape his body and fix the way he looks, with her experimental technology. And it works, for a minute. But he takes too much of it. And it makes him able to shift his skin and look like other people and stuff. He goes on a revenge spree and kills all the people that screwed him over. Except for his agent, I think. Oh and he has a crush on the Doctor lady. And sometimes he has good chemistry with her and they both seem like good actors. Sometimes they don’t have good chemistry and neither of them seem like good actors. Depends on the scene. Doctor lady’s Fiancé happens to be a cop, by the way. Who investigates the deaths of the many people that Matt is killing.

By the end, Matt kills all of them, including the cop Fiancé. Doctor lady uses the failsafe on his skin cell robots or whatever, and electrifies him. But that doesn’t kill him, ultimately. And in the end he’s in the sewers pretending to be himself and the Doctor lady simultaneously. But then he transforms into the full Clayface and shrieks or whatever.

General Thoughts
I don’t really know how much I have to say about this. It’s fine, I think. I know a lot of people who aren’t as neurotic as I am about superhero movies, and they liked it a lot more than I did. Which is great, honestly, I like when normal people like stuff like this. And this is more on the right track than something like Venom, for instance. Partially because Clayface’s origin isn’t inextricably linked to Batman, and being a dark version of Batman. To clarify, if you like the Venom movies, all power to you. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

But also you’re wrong and they’re generic and bad movies about a character who was never interesting, and the fact that they had monetary success is proof of why this world is falling apart. It’s a good thing my friend Katy doesn’t read my blog. She would kill me. Sorry, Katy. You have bad taste. The second one is okay though. They actually did some recognizable comic book stuff and sort of told a story while doing it, unlike the other two. Sigh.

Anyway, my main complaint of Clayface is that it feels messy and uneven. Like Supergirl did. There are some good practical effects. And there’s some goofy CGI that doesn’t really work or come together. Like the bit where a guy gets smothered in Clayface’s stomach. The performances are also incredibly stilted. It could just be the dialogue, because a lot of the dialogue is stuff like “Hey Doctor lady, make sure you aren’t wooed by that Hollywood heartthrob, because it would suck if you forgot about your Fiancé who is a Gotham cop. I’m pointing at myself because I am that cop Fiancé.”

The Doctor lady is played by Naomi Ackie, who I think is a good actress but again sometimes doesn’t feel like one. It’s a paradoxical film, in many ways. It doesn’t really feel like a movie that’s interested in delving into many of its themes. Instead it’s just a bunch of revenge murders that are bookended by scenes of lab results and largely uncomfortable flirting. There’s just not much to it. There isn’t much to the character of Matt Hagen. We don’t see much of him as an actor. Just some late night talk show scenes with Rob Brydon. It was nice to see him, at least. The idea of him being an actor who can change face at will is inherently interesting. But it’s barely explored. Because the movie is more interested in body horror. And those sequences are largely good. But don’t fit in thematically with the other ideas at work.

There’s also no real Hollwood satire? It would be way more interesting if Matt was a piece of shit who rose to the top and became a horrible person. He certainly does worse things than a Kraven or a Venom would do in one of their movies. But he’s doing it out of just revenge. It’s fun to watch something like Wonder Man or The Studio, because they actually have things to say about how awful Hollywood is. And I guess this is accurate in its interpretation that the industry doesn’t care about anybody, that they’ll chew you up and spit you out. But at the same time, the Hollywood aspect is part of maybe the most unrealistic part of this whole movie.

He’s nominated for an Oscar, and the other nominees he’s up against for Best Actor seem to be mid-30’s, like him. When in reality it would be one or two younger guys and three older dudes. One of them’s probably won before. One of them hasn’t won and never will, though they deserve it. And the ultimate winner would be one of the older dudes, getting an Oscar for a performance they shouldn’t have won for. Like DiCaprio sleeping in a bear.

Is It A Good Movie?
I think it mostly is? But it’s not great. It feels very generic. But less generic than it could be. There’s a villain being villainous. And he’s doing stuff that he does in the comics. So it isn’t Kraven or Joker or anything crappy like that. I would say though, James Gunn made a big thing of not making movies unless the script was solid. And maybe the script was solid. This wasn’t part of the original DC lineup. Mike Flanagan brought it to Gunn and Gunn loved it. But this feels kneecapped by whatever rewrites this got and the fact that Flanagan didn’t direct it. I’m sure James Watkins is a good Director. But this feels exceedingly work for hire. And it’s a real bummer watching this when the trailer for the new Exorcist movie played before, and that movie feels so singular in its visual language. It looks great. I’m leaning towards seeing it, despite never seeing any of the Exorcist movies.

This movie looks fine, by the way. But again, the meh CGI. And I think the combo of this and Supergirl unfortunately do not make the best case for James Gunn as the co-head of this studio. He’s great at making movies. Producing is another thing. And maybe something has happened while I’ve been trying to finish this blog post that backs up the stuff I’m talking about. But first, let’s be positive.

The Best Scene Of The Movie
I don’t hate this movie. I just don’t have many feelings either way. It’s another comic book movie, sort of. It’s better than a variety of this movie that I largely do not enjoy by a matter of degrees. I think there’s some good performances. But also, I’m sick of movies like this. None of the characters are from the comics except for Matt Hagen. This origin isn’t from the comics, I don’t think. There’s actors of pedigree running around, but I’m not a huge fan of Eddie Marsin. He’s in movies I like a good amount. Just usually as this kind of character I don’t like. He’s the jerk lawyer. This movie is also working on the amount of sophistication this kind of movie usually does, where everyone is just blatantly breaking the law and doing things they shouldn’t be able to get away with, yet it feels more like lazy writing than a call to action on a broken system that genuinely exists. The fact that the mobster is able to just walk away and then work with all the people who used to work with Matt feels… I don’t know. Stupid?

I know stuff like that does happen, but still. That mobster, by the way, is played by David Dencik. And I think he gives maybe the worst performance in the whole movie. He feels so tired and boring. It’s truly generic to a degree that makes him uninteresting, especially when he could be any number of gangsters from the comics. I think he is genuinely bad in this. Which is a shame, because he’s a rogue scientist in No Time To Die, and he’s delightful in that. Not so in this.

Anyway, there is a scene in this I genuinely love. It is the one time this movie transcends the monotony (At least for a sustained period of time beyond some brief body horror) and becomes something fun and weird that we don’t often get these days. If you’ve seen this you know what I mean. When he takes down all the mobsters in the club, and he does it one by one, tricking them all by morphing into other mobsters and partiers and stuff. That’s all fun. But right before that, he lets the girlfriend know he’s there by morphing back into himself. She gets scared and runs to all the other mobsters and tells them he’s there. And I’m thinking “He’ll have disappeared into the crowd or he’s the girlfriend or something.” But no, the camera cuts back to him, and he’s in the crowd leading a giant dance like he’s in The Mask or something. That moment is really fun. We need more synchronized club dances in movies. The last one I remember is13 Going On 30. Do this more, please. That’s the best scene. That’s worth the price of admission.

The News That Is Super Important To This Movie That I Only Get To Talk About Because I Took Too Long To Write This Review
So I’m finally finishing this blog post on Monday, November 9th, 2026. This morning the news broke that James Gunn and Peter Safran will be leaving DC Studios in December. They have been running the studio for four years. The first two years was mainly them pretending to like terrible movies they didn’t make. Specifically The Flash, the worst movie ever. They had planned a ten year run, at the very least. This was called into question by the Warner-Paramount merger (A horrible thing that sucks butt) but they assured everyone they would be continuing to do DC stuff. And now, today at time of writing, Gunn and Safran have decided to leave. Or they’ve been pushed out.

It’s hard to say. Gunn made an announcement that made it seem like he just wasn’t having a good time, because this isn’t the kind of thing he’s good at. He knows how to make a good superhero movie. He probably wasn’t having a good time doing the balance of helping other people make their movies without being overbearing or controlling. I said after Supergirl, I don’t think this means things are screwed, but it’s not a great movie, certainly. I think it’s interesting that in the press statements, Gunn and Safran mentioned the movies and shows they had a good time making and were proud of, and in both statements, I don’t think Supergirl was mentioned. It’s easy to notice, considering it’s one of five things they’ve made. Peacemaker season two also suffered because Gunn wrote it pretty quickly in conjunction with Creature Commandos and Superman. So there’s a lot of padding in that season where not much happens until suddenly there’s a kind of weird finale and lots of missed opportunities.

All of this adds up to, from an outsider perspective: A guy who’s never run a movie studio or been this kind of producer before teamed up with his longtime friend and producer to collectively bite off more than he could chew. He’s been fielding questions from fans and lunatics online for years even before he’d released anything he’d actually helped make. His actions and the things DC has made have been under an unnecessary amount of scrutiny, because nobody wants this to be original DC or current Marvel. And there’s the Snyder fans who do want this to be original DC. The director of a movie he’s not even technically making has had to leave mid-production for personal reasons, and he’s dealing with that. And now the studio he works for has been taken over by one of the worst people currently alive. I’m not afraid to identify him either. Screw you, David Ellison, you little turd. He clearly wants to just make movies and not worry about everything else. So with all that in mind, if this is him being truthful and not being forced to say this at gunpoint, it makes perfect sense and I wish him the best. Peter too, I guess. I don’t know much about him.

Where does this leave DC? Well some guy named Jeremy that I have never heard of is taking over. I guess he was a Kevin Feige protege in the early days of Marvel? Great. Except he is meant to answer to the Paramount studio heads, which Gunn and Safran didn’t have to. He’s a hired gun, basically. A face. We’re back where we started, four years ago. The question you may be asking is how do I feel about all of this? Before this year I would be quite frustrated. But after this year of superhero movies and my feelings going into Doomsday, (Which I will be writing a post about soon, so look out for that) I’ve been feeling quite negative about the future of the genre. And this didn’t impact me how I thought it would. I’m a little bummed, because I’m pretty unsure whether this’ll all fall apart again. I’d like to see some good stuff. At the end of the day, we got a really good Superman movie. And Man of Tomorrow is still coming out. From there, we’ll see. What a weird world we’re living in. Jesus.

Overall Rating: 6.4/10 (If it didn’t have that one scene, this would be a 5.9 or something. I’m judging it too harshly. But I’ve seen too much shit like this.)
Goon Rating: 7.2/10 (I like the guy who plays the goon that Matt impersonates for the majority of the club scene. He’s really fun. He’s also the one I refer to when I call him a Penguin wannabe. But complimentary.)

Next time on Too Many Servings Of John… Another comic book movie studio shitting the bed!