Welcome to the Heavy Spoilers show, I'm your host Paul, and this video we're breaking down cliffies. The next chapter in the DCU saga is now here, and this is leaning into the latter part of Gods and monsters. In this movie we follow Matt Hagen who goes on a twisted tale of revenge after being cut up by mobsters. In this video we're going to be discussing some of the easter eggs and also talking about what I liked and what I didn't. I have some pre-mixed feelings on the film and can one explain my positives and negatives, and it's going to be hard to make because I put it to the other day and people did not react well to it.
Whew, but we'll see how it goes. Can we have some of you ones please? Can we fuck? But we join Matt Hagen who's a big star in Co City. This is the home of Hal Jordan, and he can't mention in Latin, so it's a nice little lead to start here.
As we see, Matt is currently up for Oscar nominations, and it seems like he's having the time of his life. Amongst the films he's competing with are One Bad Day and also No Man's Land, which if you're a fan of DC, you'll know are based on Batman graphic novels. The story for this film focuses around the ideas brought up in the former, in which person just needs to have One Bad Day to become the Joker. We see that play out when Matt returns to Gotham, and he spends the night with a woman named Mia Torres. Now from the off, Tom Rysary's who plays Hagen is the person that really carries the picture.
The guy's phenomenal throughout, and he really excels beyond the material. He just bounces about perfectly when it comes to tone and goes from being a sympathetic man who's at the end of his rope to a lovable, affable guy to someone with all the power of the world who's ready to use it and be corrupted by it. I definitely think he's got a bright future ahead of him, and he's by far the best bit of the movie. Which yeah, what did you lead? Obviously you need to be.
Unfortunately, where I felt the movie fell flat was in most of the side characters, especially the mobsters. The Batman and Penguin showed what you can do with these complex characters that just ooze evil in a really subtle way. On the flip side of this, these guys really feel like it's stepped down, and are pretty much just a Batman away from being like, it's the freaking bat! Like David Denchick too, who plays the main guy, and I think he's great in like, ticket ailer soldiers by, and I know he gets a lot of hate for no time to die, but I like him there as well. Even here he really sells himself as a mobster, but the dialogue to me was just kind of Sony level so far as good as he is, he's still only playing to that level of writing.
What we have here though is a Savo crime family who's lead that just happens to be the boyfriend of Mia. Matt brushes this off at the club in all his arrogance, and the bosses come to leave him with a mark that he won't ever forget. Right from the off the like I said this felt like Sony level dialogue, and he even admits to killing Matt's dad when he was younger. It's just really really cartoonish, and the weird thing is it didn't even need to be in the film. He was in Gotham researching bats when he died and he did it.
Yeah, just really dropped the ball without a think, but he cuts his face up and Matt recovers as a broken shell of the man he once was, to make things worse. Due to the corruption in Gotham, Matt's unable to really do anything to right the wrongs. He's beaten and caught and lies to spread about him because Savo buys off the witnesses and has Matt's pals and partners in his pocket. I think the police force and corruption is just another way the film really stumbles, and it just isn't really that much depth to the corrupt officers. Again, not to bring up the batman, but we really see what the crooked cops are like beyond just the surface and how they manipulate the system and all those around them.
Yeah, it's just like, hey that's a nice watch, and the cop is obviously corrupt. Even with that, he shows up down the line from time to time but just gets dropped and doesn't come back into the picture at all after a certain point around the hour mark. So it's just constantly dropping the ball with stuff. There's also characters like Matt's agent who he has an argue with in the premiere, but she's neither in the film before or after, so it's like, why even include this character when it doesn't really add anything. Beyond that, there's a cameo by Aaron Paul as Matt's dad, but he's only in for like a split second shot and that's all we get.
Now because of that, I couldn't help but think there was probably a flashback seen on the cutting room floor somewhere where Paul got to really portray his father. It touched upon how he was abusive and made Matt's life hell, but I think it could have have been a great case of show, don't tell. Looking at the IMDB cast list as well, we know that Seth Isectonic played a young Matt Hagen and he isn't in the movie, so yeah, there was definitely some stuff cut from the film. Anyway, Matt is at his wit's end and living in the narrows which was first introduced in Batman Begins since then it's become a staple of Gotham and is basically the worst of the worst of the worst, so with Arnaz. So yeah, that Matt comes across a radical new nanotechnology treatment that potentially has the ability to heal him.
Led up by Naomi Akis Dr. Caitlin, she's someone who's been shunned from the science world with her partners also taking her work and leaving her in the dirt. Makes that a nice parallel to Matt and I think Akis really, really strong the film too. I have seen some reviews that talk about how the love plot felt a bit forced, but honestly, I kind of think I added to the movie. I think it's important for Matt to stop focusing on his career and look to attach something in his personal life and having him falling in love with her, it makes the movie feel more personal.
It creates a love triangle where she's stuck between her patient Matt and her fiancé John, who's one of the only good cops in Gotham. We live like Caitlin's brother died from Huntington's disease which in the comics is what Mr. Frees is what Mr. Frees is what is the wife Norris is from. This is also a big part of the movie Batman Robin which is another DC classic, but there was a change to McGregor syndrome and Alfred's up in it.
In this film though, Caitlin's unable to do human trials, but Matt puts himself forward and signs the way everything to have himself worked on. Now there's still a hell of a lot to talk about and we are going to get into the movie, even if you barely touch alcohol. Between everyday meals, the odd sugary drink, processed foods, stress and all the natural waste your body produces, it rarely gets a real break. It's constantly on the job, but that's where it does for your liver comes in. It's a simple, daily shot that tastes like orange juice and it's designed to give your liver some proper backup.
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That's D-O-S-E-D-A-I-I-L-Y dot C-O slash heavyspoilers for 35% off your first month subscription. Try it for three months now and see how you feel and yeah, go check out that link in the description. Thanks. Anyway, after the trials continue, Matt's face is fixed up and it seems like everything is coming up Mel House. How about his face starts to melt from time to time and thus he gets addicted to the nanotech and keeping things in check.
The changes are brought on by him spiraling emotionally and we get a really great scene on an airplane. I was really tensing out when he was cutting through his eyelids and that and the later club scene are like the two stand out parts of the movie for me. Now he realizes that Caitlyn grants him and emotionally she becomes his anchor. His face gets worse and worse though and he ends up going overboard and injects the entire substance into his face. Now this is where his abilities are really taken in the next step and his skin and blood cells have given him healing abilities.
Anything can offer a move that will make its way back to him in order to retain his full form. Beyond this he's also able to change how he looks. He ends up going on a hunt for revenge against those that wronged him and uses his shape-shifting abilities to appear like them in full witnesses. This is the real heart of the movie and we watch him move through those that wronged him while John follows the case. We get some obvious nuts to the godfather.
I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart. I think the scene with his best friend who betrayed him is a really great moment where Tom just gets to play up how heartbroken this guy feels. Even plays this him just to go and taunt me out who's working as an actress on the film.
It's stuff like this where I think the movie saws but actually don't think it goes far enough. It's labeled as being a DC horror movie but I actually think it's more along the lines of Venom with an R rating. Like if you said Joko was a horror movie it's kind of along the same lines as that. There are some creative kills though and they do a lot with the body horror but they don't quite push things to level that I would really look back on this in many Halloween's to come and be like ooh let's put on Clayface tonight. The classic horror.
This revenge plot I did feel was satisfying though and after Zabo sends his goons to get Kaitlyn, Matt takes one of their forms and infiltrates the nightclub way first met Mia. There's some really good moments during this and the quick cuts as they swap out actors as Matt changes shape is completely seamless. I'd love to watch some of these moments in slow motion to see if I can spot where they stitch together but you really have the actors all remaining in the exact same place so it's so difficult to tell. I will say as well the movie has some great effects and considering it's got a really small budget they do make the most of it. Well outside of how Clayface looks but I'll talk about that in just a bit.
But there are some little build-ups in this including a big fat smiley face drawn on the window and Hagen shadow beating Zabo's henchmen with a giant spiced hand. Eventually he gets to the mob boss and after killing Mia he cuts his face in the same scars that the boss originally gave him. He bleeds into Zabo's face and then the particles pull himself back together through his pores and orifices which is a really solid death and I think it makes the most of the concept. Things on over and the investigation starts closing and on Matt after professing his love to Caitlyn and it clearly being him behind the crimes John confronts him at his apartment. Matt denies everything and we then John Caitlyn returning home having gone over all the files on Matt.
She confesses that truth to her fiance he then reveals himself to be mad in disguise as she discovers her fiance's body. It feels very akin to the fly and considering the movie had crits so much from it I was actually thinking this might be where they take the final showdown. Caitlyn shocks Matt by using a taser though and he begs for death as she activates the killer switch which fries all in on machines in his body. This ends him to a seemingly watery grave in the sewers but as we know with Clayface it made out Clay's very hard to kill. Now I do think the final look of Clayface is going to be something that a lot of people go back and forth on.
He's a big blob glob man which technically is what Clayface is but they also try and keep his human face in their two so they can have Tom's performance come through. Now I'm going to say I totally understand that and I think they probably created countless visions of his final look where some would have been closer to the classic look from the comics whereas others would have been more human in appearance. Like a man made out of mud. I think this is probably the middle ground they settled on but because of that it feels a bit muddled for lack of a better word. That wasn't terrible for me and I understand why they ended up here but I know it's going to be a big point of contention.
Surf Dracula has become a big talking point in the wake of Blanton and in case you don't know it's basically built off a tweet about how back in the day if you had a show called Surf Dracula then every single week you'd see Dracula surfing. These days you need to have things teased out by ages and ages until like the final scene finally has Dracula picking up the surfboard. It's a criticism that was levied heavily against Lattens. I do understand why they did it there and here. But Hagen is now seemingly gone and we see Caitlyn trying to get back to a regular life.
How about do the fact that Mac can look like anyone. She constantly finds herself looking around seeing people in the crowd and wondering if it's him. She's approached by a homeless man who she gives some change and we then fall back to the sewers. Staring in a mirror we see he changes into Matt and we find that he's joined by Caitlyn who's come to spend her life with him. The two have an intimate moment and it seems like they're going to be there for each other but we then pull out to see that Caitlyn is merely just a part of Matt and he's performing it as part of a fantasy.
It plays upon him morphing into her earlier in the movie when he was asleep and it looked like he was getting it on with her in the bed. Ultimately he's trapped in a well of mystery though fantasizing about a life he'll never have. Matt brought up in the film how he acts because it's easier than being him and putting on someone else's face has allowed him to dissociate from himself. He's now stuck in this fantasy unable to accept who he really is and living beneath the streets of Gotham waiting to make his move. Now there wasn't any post credits seen at the showing I was at and I saw this at a silly world secret screaming which is pretty much always the wide release vision of the movie.
I've seen stuff in the past where they haven't shown a post credits seen at things and people have come out with reviews talking about how there wasn't one there and then it turned out there was and people are like what the hell did they send me to review this when it's not even got the post credits seen. Say there was a post credits seen then please drop it in the comments below because that's what they're for. Did Clay Face come out and say it's Clay facing time? Let me know in the comments below but we do know that this vision of the character continues on to feature in Creature Commandos. There he was seemingly killed but James got clarified that the reports of Clay Face's death have been greatly exaggerated.
He's of course made of mushy mushy clay nano tech stub and can separate and come together so even beyond Creature Commandos the character likely survives. I'm not sure if I'm dying to see a sequel to this stuff. Now that kind of takes me to the review and I did walk away from it with pretty mixed feelings and there was a lot that I think if they tweaked it could have taken us to something that was really really good. Great you would say but it just doesn't hit that height. Now if you've been watching the channel for a while you know I'm a massive fan of Mike Flanagan so I was really excited when I heard he was penning the script.
How about he has kind of distanced himself from the project and said they took his script and have changed some stuff and that he's not really sure where things have gone. I think you can definitely feel that too and there's a lot of things that don't really get developed here and even the Rob Riden chat show at the start that feels like it's setting some big things up like the ending of Joker but it's just left by the wayside. Comparing into that film you really see where a supervillain origin story succeeds, where this fails. There the chat shows tease to us at the start as part of Joker's fantasy and that's when he goes on it and it goes horribly wrong it sends him spiraling to the point of murder. Here the chat show happens for real at first and then it's a fantasy that appears later on and ends up not really going anywhere.
I think the supporting characters really let the film down too. Watching this made me realise just how important Penny and Thomas Wayne were to Joker and there's nothing here that's performed or written to the same level that that was so it doesn't really help build up the surrounding elements of the film. So for as good as the leads are the rest of the material just let stuff down. I think if you just catch all you'd probably have a better time just going back and watching the fly because it does everything that Clayface does but on a much better level. So I am mixed and I also have to view this in terms of being the third film in the DCU.
So far I thought Superman was okay I didn't really enjoy Supergirl and I think this is okay too. Probably my favourite of the three but there's nothing here that I think is going to change the genre in the same way that several of the DC films have. There's a reason that Christopher Nolan has gone on to be like the biggest director in Hollywood and yeah it's kind of insane to me that we were getting like that level of a DC movie 15 years ago and this is the level where they're putting stuff out now at. So yeah maybe I'm too old in cynical but I can't really see this being a film that people look back on as one of those milestones which yeah the DC really needs to be doing to even be close to competing with Marvel. They needed a home run at this point.
Marvel is probably going to do two two billion dollar movies this year and after Supergirl bombed his badly as it did I think DCU's need some big wins especially in the wake of the Paramount major and I'm not sure this is going to be it. Now look mate I'm trying to be as balanced as possible and I know without fail I'm going to get shit for this. It's even the point that after I posted my reaction on Twitter like DC accounts saying I made a racist review about Latin's episode three and the guy said I criticised it for being race bait. Meanwhile in reality if you go watch the video I said it was one of the best hours in all of the DCU and didn't bring up any race bait at all. It's kind of wild as well because last week I was seeing all the backlash of the laddens and I started being like hmm they had a point on some stuff to be fair like Sheriff Carrie faced no consequences but it's worse to live in the guilt than go to prison.
Mmm isn't that all maybe the criticism was right there maybe she should have gone to jail. John Stoller the Ring off a corpse and has an unsanctioned lantern that is made with fear. Mmm yeah but maybe this is not good. So yeah I've been thinking people are going to think I'm an idiot for giving Latin positive reviews but instead people have made up that I hate it just to say I'm racist and the DC fandom comes out you fast in ways you don't expect. I hate your arrest is no further.
And one guy who even went back to a mall tweeted to find where I said the rebel moon trailer looked like Zack Snyder had a baby with Zack Snyder and the baby came out and was Zack Snyder who made a movie called Zack Snyder and it's like ah mate you thought the trailer for Rebel Moonlooker did you? Opinion null and void am I afraid? So yeah the discourse is kind of tiring and I need you guys to understand yeah that it is actually the worst confirmation bias and cult like mentales you can have to attach your personality to a brand. Decide that everything is going to be good even without seeing it and then going to accuse people of being biased because they didn't like it even though you are the biased one in this situation. It's another level of stupid that just gone stoop to so please keep all your comments so please.
But I think we hit a point where people aren't even arguing with your opinion. They're arguing with the perception of your opinion and like how you're a shill and how you got paid by Marvel. Like I got paid by DC to say or write something negative or positive and they're coming up with the ways that it can't be genuine rather than actually engaging with it. It just makes me think like is this the point that we've hit with stuff. Now I know it's very small group of people who do that and I know most of my audience is more mature than this and I'm totally open to hearing your guys opinion on the film as long as it's civil and we can talk about the movie in a way that isn't just shouting shill or hate at each other because yeah it's just impossible to talk about this stuff.
But overall to me Clayface was okay but I think this needed to be a great film that definitely had the potential to exceed to that level however there were just some things that really held it back from hitting it. I think this film to show what the DC monster side of chapter one was going to do but unfortunately if the rest of it is along these lines I think we're gonna end up with like a slightly better Sony Spider-Man less Spider-Man villain set of movies and I'm not sure how that's gonna play in terms of getting the ball back from Marvel. We're watching it I remember how flaggy's process is to basically have to make the movie show to him and then he comes back with notes and then they go back and fix all this stuff. Made me realize he must be some like visionary genius because they definitely haven't had that level of audience awareness in these projects. Even picking stuff like the grille I grud thing that's coming up.
It's like is that the right choice? So yeah let me know your thoughts below I'd love to hear them. It's just another one of those films I actually because I didn't like the last two ones I was actually more on board for liking this I'm like well I can't hate three films in a row and though I thought it was okay. Yeah just left a lot to be decided I think. But do you agree?
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