‘Clayface’ Is More Interesting for Skipping the Franchise Homework
The character has carried different names and incarnations through DC Comics products for 86 years, and Variety's critic reports that none of that history is required to watch the film. That freedom is much of why the reviewer finds this comparatively obscure comic-book adaptation considerably more interesting all round: it doesn't yet feel bound to any superhero property.
James Watkins, the British genre craftsman behind Eden Lake and Speak No Evil, directs with good humor and a healthy sense of the grotesque, and the review says the film's debts run to cartoonish Nineties horror like Darkman and Thinner as much as to its own franchise lineage.
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Three movies into the so-called DC Universe, the connective branding still hasn't cut through to anyone but the most devoted nerds — and the entries that don't feel bound to the shared world are the ones worth the ticket.
Not needing the homework isn't the same as having no roots: Mike Flanagan's script still co-opts the classic Clayface origin, an actor with an ax to grind who gains shapeshifting abilities.