A 'Ramayana' spectacle

  If you’re looking for a big movie with big themes and epic sweep, Ramayana: Rise of a Legend should fill the bill. Loaded with plot twists, spectacle, and characters, Ramayana has a simple spine that pits good against evil and operates on the cosmic mythic levels. What? You wanted something bigger? 

   I’ll offer as brief a synopsis as possible. Before Ram (Ranbir Kapoor), the seventh incarnation of Lord Vishnu, can take over the kingdom of Ayodhya, he's forced into a 14-year exile with his wife Sita (Sai Pallavi) and his loyal brother Lakshman (Ravi Dubey). 

    Deeper trouble looms. Rama eventually must confront the evil Ravana (a fearsome Yash), an evil ruler who controls the three worlds (earth, heaven, and the underworld) that constitute the movie’s universe. He's nearly indestructible thanks to an intervention by the creator god Brahma.

    Don’t let the names throw you. This ancient story functions as one of the foundational texts for Hindus. But it also tells a story that can be seen as a grand adventure that should be no more taxing to viewers than the average Star Wars movie.

    Director Nitesh Tiwari has taken on a massive task, creating a three-hour movie (I saw the three-hour version in Hindi with subtitles) that includes gilded sets, elaborate costumes, monsters, lavish weddings, and a flying machine that’s appears during a kidnapping. 

  Trust me. That's a short list.

  Leaning heavily into CGI and digital effects, Tiwari employs a broad approach to storytelling, wooing audiences with spectacle. In the early going, the artifice was so thickly applied, I wondered whether I was watching an animated film. 

   Put another way, it took me a moment to acclimate to the hyper-vivid visual style of the movie's extended prologue. 

   Shot through with ideas about fate and personal destiny and, as the screenplay puts it, finding one's dharma, the movie allows for the intermingling of humans and gods and serves as an accessible way to approach an ancient Sanskrit poem.

   A musical score by Hans Zimmer and A.R. Rahman alternates between lush melodrama and infectious Indian rhythms, offering echoes of both Hollywood and Bollywood. 

  Tiwari isn’t going for subtlety; he’s looking for wow factor. More often than not, he finds it, delivering a movie full of operatic emotional swells.

   At three hours long, Ramayana never bored me and left me anticipating the next chapter. Yes, three hours wasn’t enough. Tiwari plans to release the second installment next year.

    

How 'Rocky' made it to the screen

     

   Like the movie it's about, I Play Rocky tells a story about an underdog who earns his day in the sun. A  perennial favorite for repeat viewings among generations of viewers, Rocky won an Oscar for best picture in 1977, sparking a series of sequels that continued the Rocky legend. 

   Credit I Play Rocky with riding the waves of affection viewers have for a film released thirty years ago. The movie aspires to be an unabashed crowdpleaser built around an engaging performance from Anthony Ippolito as Sylvester Stallone. 

   Ippolito takes over the film. He captures Stallone’s likability, goofy charm, and his ability to meld with Rocky Balboa, a character that served as the actor's big screen avatar. Ippolito nails Stallone’s voice, body language, and resolve, and he looks enough like Stallone to keep his appearance from becoming a distraction.

    Written by Peter Gamble and directed by Peter Farrelly (Green Book), the movie begins at a moment when Stallone is down-and-out in Manhattan. He tries for acting gigs, toys with writing, and briefly dips into porn. 

   Farrelly treats Stallone's New York life as a foray into impoverishment for an artist who needs a break. On a night spent sleeping on the street, Stallone acquires his beloved dog, Butkus, named for the tough-as-nails football player, Dick Butkus.

     Geez, a hard-luck guy finds a stray bullmastiff that's more loyal than cute. I guess it makes sense because it's true. Besides, Stallone has a knack for making something that could have felt contrived or overly sentimental into something audiences willingly accept.

    While working as a ticket taker at a movie theater, Stallone meets Sasha (a strong AnnaSophia Robb), who would become his first wife and biggest booster, shoring up his confidence when it wavers.

    The film soon shifts to Los Angeles, where Stallone, Sasha try to gain a foothold. Working as a valet and attending auditions, Stallone manages to get one of his screenplays in front of the producing team of Robert Chartoff (Toby Kebell) and Irwin Winkler (P.J. Byrne). 

   They're impressed by Stallone's Paradise Alley, but don't become seriously enthusiastic until they read the screenplay for Rocky, written by Stallone in three feverish days.  

   Enthusiasm aside, neither Chartoff nor Winkler believe Stallone should play the lead. They want a name actor, as does an unashamedly unpleasant studio exec, perfectly rendered by Tracy Letts. 

     After lots of wrangling, a deal is made for Stallone to play the title role, but by way of compromise, the picture is given a paltry $1 million budget. To move things along, the team hires John G. Avildsen (a standout Jay Duplass), a no-nonsense director with a knack for getting big-screen bang for limited bucks.

      The production then heads to Philadelphia, a non-union location that would be cheaper than New York. Stallone trains. He injures himself but keeps working. A signature scene -- Rocky racing up the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art -- is made possible by the introduction of the Steadicam, a body support rig that allows a cameraman to move while minimizing camera shakiness.

     The rest of the movie unfolds more as an illustrated checklist than an evolving drama. We see Stallone in shoes on an ice rink as he tries to support an unsteady Talia Shire (Kiki Seto). We smile because we remember the scene from Rocky.

    Among the supporting actors,  Stephan James has fun as Carl Weathers, the buffed actor who bluffs  his way into playing Apollo Creed. Matt Dillon is underutilized as Stallone’s sour, unsupportive father.

     Upbeat and hitting the expected notes, I Play Rocky may not be a big-screen knockout, but it scores a victory on points, and Ippolito’s performance keeps Stallone from becoming a cartoonish brute -- which, after all, is what Stallone accomplished as Rocky Balboa.  

Another booming helping of Godzilla

 

  Godzilla Minus Zero is a big deal. Big deal, as in available in IMAX, stocked with large-scale devastation, and offering a much-anticipated continuation of what began three years ago in the widely praised Godzilla Minus One, an Oscar winner for its visual effects.

   Directed by Takashi Yamazaki, who brought One to the screen, the movie continues its bravura display of visual effects and returns important characters for a sequel that begins in 1949, two years after the first installment concluded.

    Ryuunosuke Kamiki portrays Koichi Shikishima, a former kamikaze pilot who battled Godzilla in the earlier movie. Minami Hamabe returns as Noriko, now Koichi’s wife. The couple lives a relatively normal existence with their adopted daughter Akiko (Sae Nagatani), a kid whose crying can be almost as piercing as Godzilla’s roar.

   The big addition involves a new monster called Ghidorah, a three-headed, fire-breathing beast with immense destructive power. Early on, Ghidorah destroys Matsumoto, a city that was minding its own business until the flying monster came along.

   If you see the film in IMAX, the story probably plays better with Yamazaki following his predecessors by linking the screenplay to memories of the decimation of Hiroshima, both in their scale and tragic consequences.

    Say this: Yamazaki does monsters right, animating them with expressive force and deftly adding the gore that roots them in gooey, repellant biology. 

   Sadly, the human characters don’t have as much charge. Min Tanaka plays a professor whose family perished in Hiroshima. Hidetaka Yoshioka joins him as the engineer who heads the team charged with defeating the monsters. 

    Tanaka's embittered Kanji Murakami contrasts with self-interested US military officers who become cardboard cutouts with little regard for Japan.

   The movie’s production team excels at creating post-war detail, and it can feel as if we’re watching a 1950s monster movie that has been super-charged with contemporary effects. 

    At the same time, the ordinary sights of Japan -- homes, laboratories, and city streets -- emit an appealing nostalgic glow.

     A theme of sacrifice for the greater good emerges when Noriko, who has a dose of Godzilla DNA, is asked to serve as bait to lure Godzilla from the ocean depths. Hey, don't ask me to explain. I didn't write the movie.

    This is probably a fans-only endeavor. Because we know the monsters will reveal themselves, there’s not much suspense or fear in this addition to the kaiju catalog, and Godzilla almost becomes a supporting character. 

    In its third act, Minus Zero falls a bit flat. Yamazaki has too many loose ends to tie up, and thematically, the movie strains to override a revenge element introduced earlier.

    Considering both movies, though, Yamazaki has revived a 72-year-old phenomenon no one seems able to kill. Another helping seems inevitable.

'Fatherland': a study in disconnection

 Fatherland isn’t like other movies — at least not like most of the movies we see these days. Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Ida and Cold War) hovers somewhere between realism and carefully honed style. He seldom squeezes his characters into suffocating close-ups.

  But Pawlikowski, who isn't afraid to film in black and white, shouldn't be considered a pure stylist; his movies are rooted in substance. In Fatherland, Pawlikowski follows a 1949 journey famed author Thomas Mann made to Germany, returning to a country he had left in 1933, escaping Hitler's rise. 

  Every image in Fatherland seems to have been calculated to create an atmosphere that reflects the disorientation Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter (Sandra Huller) experience in a country they no longer consider home. 

  But Mann was at home in the German language, and he tries to use his stature to advance an optimistically lofty view of the possibilities for a new Germany, one steeped in cultural achievement. 

   Mann arrives in Germany to receive two Goethe awards, one in West Germany’s Frankfurt, the other in East Germany’s Weimar. For him, Geothe stands as a writer of lasting influence, a high point of German culture.

   As portrayed by Zischler, Mann becomes an art narcissist, an author who believes he can climb a cultural  mountain that’s high enough to see a transformed Germany as an exemplar for the world. 

  That’s a big and perhaps naive ambition for Germany in 1949 when, as the movie acknowledges, many former Nazis were trying to establish themselves in West Germany, and much of the country was in ruins.

  Mann's imposing presence aside, the movie’s soul belongs to two of Mann’s children. Nervously smoking and ill at ease, Huller’s Erika is tightly wound enough to slap her ex-husband at a reception for the author. A well-known actor, the former spouse remained in Germany and courted Nazi favor.

  Mann’s son, Klaus (a briefly seen August Diehl) opens the movie in what amounts to a prologue. Naked on the floor of his room, Klaus barely acknowledges the lover who's on the verge of exiting. 

   In a phone call with his sister, Klaus poses the choice facing the West as one of conflicting polarities, the crass commercialism of a Mickey Mouse culture or the murderous calculations of Stalin's communism. Disgusted by both options, Klaus commits suicide, something we learn about later in the movie.

    The suicide underscores Mann's aloofness. He insists on continuing his trip, delivering a speech that outlines his vision for a new world to a stoic audience in East Germany. The audience looks as if the life had been drained from it.

   In some ways, Mann is a pawn. The Soviets want to use him to prove that a great artist supports the world-improving goals of Communism; the Americans hope he doesn’t go too far in that direction. By the time the movie opens, Mann was an American citizen living in California, a sun-splashed state that couldn't feel further from a decimated Germany.

    With Mann nearing the end of his days, the movie functions as a dirge for the author and for something larger, a cultural moment when grand, elevating visions seemed possible. 

   Pawlikowski’s approach may strike some as airless. That’s not entirely wrong, but Pawlikowski has made a clear choice. At times, the movie feels like a low-grade nightmare. A sense of disconnection seems to preclude the possibility of a life in which it’s possible to feel at home, as reflected in the German word “heimat,’’ i.e., the place one belongs.

    Weariness and resignation penetrate  Zischler's performance, as if Mann knows that his day is done. 

   It’s worth noting that Pawlikowski doesn’t adhere to historical fact. Mann made the trip with his wife, not his daughter. His son committed suicide after the trip, not during it.

    Presumably, Pawlikowski wanted to bring the sharply edged Erika into play. Klaus’s death emphasizes Mann’s haughtiness and self-absorption and supports Pawlikowski's depiction of the irreparable alienation that defines a challenging and deeply fraught world where many of the old guideposts have crumbled.

Rockwell/Malkovich play great duet

  If you see the trailer for Wild Horse Nine, the new movie teaming John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, you may think that you’re in for another comedy about a couple of wise-ass characters.

 But if you notice that the movie has been directed by Martin McDonagh (The Banshees of Inisherin, In Bruges, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), you’ll put yourself in the right frame of mind for an unlikely but engaging mixture of dark comedy, political cynicism, and sentiment focused on a couple of CIA assassins.

   Perfectly paired, Rockwell and Malkovich play a finely calibrated duet. Malkovich portrays Chris Carlisle, a veteran CIA agent who has taken part in many operations, including the Congo, Indonesia, and the Bay of Pigs. 

   Chris is a mysterious figure who can be both off-putting and sympathetic; he’s marked by sadness and a disease-induced loss of memory, and Malkovich delivers what qualifies as one his best big-screen performance. Fresh and funny, Malkovich gives life to one his memorable characters. 

   Younger and less experienced, Rockwell’s Lee Chesterfield tries to curb Chris’ uncontrolled instincts. Chesterfield? Sounds like a character from a Masterpiece Theatre series or maybe he was named for a once-popular brand of American cigarettes. He's an avid eater.

    Lee takes the terminally ill Chris on a final trip to Easter Island. Chris has always wanted to see the island's giant heads, but from the outset, it's clear these guys aren't tourists. Political issues color McDonagh’s unconventional character study, threatening to emerge like a bitter aftertaste.

   Both men work for MJ (Steve Buscemi in another rich role), the head of CIA operations in Latin America. The movie takes place in 1973, just before the overthrow of Allende’s leftist government in Chile. Chris and Lee have been working to destabilize the country, tilling the soil for an emerging right-wing Pinochet government.

   An airport encounter with two women (Mariana di Girolama and Ailin Salas) establishes Chris as a sarcastic flirt who talks too much. The two women will reappear on Easter Island, where we learn that Chris might be working on a memoir that could embarrass the CIA with a bombshell disclosure.

   When things get hairy on Easter Island, McDonagh introduces Lee’s stateside wife Marge, a terrifically perturbed Parker Posey, who, in a phone call with Lee, puts an indelible stamp on the role of a woman who gives as good as she gets.

   Tom Waits makes an impressive brief appearance as Chris’s estranged brother, a hermit songwriter who lives in a cabin from which he can view Monument Valley. 

    You'll also see the Rapa Nui coastline with the giant heads, which become a source of mystery and comedy, aided by another strong Carter Burwell score.

   McDonagh’s script finds ways to make fun of wokeness and inefficient spying. He even includes a monologue in which Chris tells Lee which countries should be regarded as gay (England, France, Holland, and Switzerland). Gay countries, he insists, are known for fine cheeses, an absurd correlation that puts Malkovich and Rockwell on the edge of a silly comic routine.

    But McDonagh’s dialogue also can be deadly serious. At one point, Chris says that protest marches are fine but history moves through murder, the elimination of those who oppose one's interests, a chilling assertion if you think about it.

   True to his tendency to shift tones, McDonagh takes a lyrical approach to the wild horses of Easter Island, using one in particular to connect with Chris. Could this friendly horse and Lee be part of a vanishing breed, something like the cowboys of the Old West — or of Old Westerns?

  All of this is leavened by Chris’s keen awareness of his mortality, which becomes the movie’s awareness, as well. A Catholic by faith, he seems to be serious when he wonders whether his chances of getting into heaven as a CIA assassin might be better than those of a loathsome Nazi who had nonetheless performed one worthy act.  

   McDonagh manages the movie’s tonal variations without much strain and pushes the plot in unexpected directions, fulfilling genre obligations while also cleverly playing with them. Not an easy task.

    Fair to call Wild Horse Nine a dark comedy about characters who might be more than a few ticks beyond redemption but get to us anyway. They may be hitmen, but they're a couple of classics.

'Fjord' challenges audiences to react

 Fjord, a provocative drama from Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, tackles the difficult subject of child abuse, turning it into a springboard for examining cultural conflict and rigid institutional power. 

  Fjord may be an anomaly. Mungiu’s movie asks liberal-leaning audiences to accept the idea that a Pentecostal Christian family can become victims of severely applied state policies about child abuse and the separation of church and state.

   That's a big script to flip, but Mungiu does it without apology, presumably to show that unquestioned dogma, whatever its origins, can be unfair and harmful.

   Sebastian Stan portrays Mihai, a Romanian father who moves to Norway with his Norwegian wife (Renate Reinsve) and their five children. An aeronautical engineer by trade, Mihai has taken a low-level IT job. Reinsve’s Lisbet works at a local senior center, where she often comforts those who lose loved ones.

    Well known to festival audiences, Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) has written a screenplay that quickly plunges Mihai into a crisis. School authorities accuse him of child abuse. 

     The case begins when a teacher notices that Elia (one of Mihai’s daughters) has a bruised cheek. Mihai and his wife are then pitted against child protection authorities who see only one side of the story. They refuse to acknowledge that Romanian standards of parental control may differ from Norway's. 

     For his part, Mihai admits that in rare instances, he slaps his kids on the butt. In Norway, spanking is banned by law. 

     During the ensuing investigation, Mihai and Lisbet's five children, including an infant, are removed from their home and placed in foster care.

   The school’s headmaster (Markus Scarth Tonseth) seems like an even-handed fellow. As one of Mihai and Lisbet’s neighbors, he warmly welcomes them to the small town but finds himself pushed by the school's child protection officer to allow the case to proceed.

    Sincere in his religious beliefs, Mihai articulates his positions clearly and without compromise, but he’s never wild-eyed about them. He believes he's inculcating moral values in his kids that will serve them well throughout their lives. He's staunch in his beliefs, but Stans wisely keeps him from becoming an ogre.

     As the story develops, the initially welcoming townsfolk begin to stand against the family. After firing an insensitive lawyer, Mihai and Lisbet turn to one of their neighbors, a lawyer (Lisa Carlehed) who handles the civil case against them. She happens to be married to the school's head master.

    Carlehed's character acknowledges that outsiders can never be sure what happens in families, but questions the case against Mihai. The bruises on his daughter’s face could have resulted from a wrestling session at school, for example. 

      Elia (Vanessa Ceban), the daughter in question, befriends Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen), the lawyer's daughter, a teenager who tries to coax Elia into activities that cut against the grain of the family's religious beliefs, which the kids take seriously.

       Mungiu may be more interested in challenging dogmatic approaches than in getting to the bottom of Mihai's story, which was inspired by a real case. Mungiu seems to be saying that once a value-laden issue becomes entangled in a rule-oriented system, possibilities for a truly human solutions diminish. 

      Put another way, the film allows for some ambiguity, but becomes a cautionary tale about the dangers of believing in the absolute rightness of one's position. 

    Does the film show what can happen when religious and cultural beliefs are challenged by members of civil society? Yes. Is the case Mungiu has chosen an instructive but isolated example or does it reveal something more general about those who administer Norwegian child protection policies? I'm not sure.

      For me, not being able to answer the latter questions weakens an otherwise complex and involving drama that Mungiu directs with assurance, restraint, and sobering austerity.  

Turturro at his best in ‘Pickpocket’

    Melancholic and keenly attuned to the world of low-level New York City crime, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York provides an old-school helping of urban life that revolves around John Turturro’s performance as Harry, a pickpocket nearing the end of his hustle. 

   Times have changed. Credit cards have put a crimp on light-fingered activities. The bricks that held up the old street order are crumbling. The movie can be taken as an ode to New York City as a haven for layers of hidden subcultures and the characters who occupy them.

     Steve Buscemi — a master of making big impressions in small roles — plays Ben, a pawnshop owner who has known Harry for years. The two men understand each other, although both recognize the transactional imperatives of their relationship. Harry's a seller,  Ben, a buyer.

      Turturro’s performance has a sad-sack quality that’s enhanced by the roomy gray overcoat he wears, a necessity of his trade as well as a cloak of anonymity, something to disappear inside. 

     The story hinges on a stroke of epic bad luck. Harry picks the wrong target. He steals from a 1969 Trans Am belonging to a Gen Z hotshot (Will Price). Harry's haul includes a bag containing a gun and, more importantly, a USB chip holder Harry considers baffling and worthless. It’s the young man’s key to his  brand of larceny. He wants it back, and can call on mob connections for help.

      Harry’s life is weighted with woe. His wife (Karina Arroyave)  is bed-ridden, immobile, and unable to communicate. Harry cares for her with extraordinary tenderness, treating her as if she were an active participant in the conversations he pretends to have with her in their Bronx apartment.

      Harry’s chance subway encounter with a long-time adversary (Giancarlo Esposito), a detective who’s also aging out of his job, captures a spirit of shared obsolescence. The two former adversaries know their worlds are vanishing, even if they haven’t totally given up the fight.

      Turturro's performance has plenty of nuance. A scene in which he visits his long-estranged daughter (Tatiana Maslany) proves quietly touching. A single tear rolls down Harry’s cheek. He recognizes the righteousness of his daughter’s anger about a father who was never available to her.

        Director Noah Segan adds caper-like flavor to the final going, which includes a masterful cameo  from Jamie Lee Curtis. But the movie's unforced delight stems from the director’s obvious fondness for Harry and the city that bred him.

       In his apartment, Harry dances alone to Odyssey's Native New Yorker, a 1977 disco hit. Full of grace and control, the moment feels free and beautiful, a recollection of long ago nights out.  It's a small moment with big-deal vibes. Segan and Turturro find a rare expression of Harry at his best, a complete melding of the man and his environment. 

       Native New Yorker indeed.

A deeply absorbing 'Possible Love'

    Korean director Lee Chang-dong isn’t in a hurry nor is he eager to clobber an audience with heavy-handed plot points. Instead, Lee (Burning) unwinds a story slowly, all the while deepening our understanding of his characters. In Lee's hands, the ordinary can become revealing. 

   In Possible Love, Lee introduces us to two couples -- one, working class, the other, affluent. He brings them together with a provocative twist: Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) wants to make a documentary that focuses on working-class life, a group to which she no longer belongs thanks to her marriage to a successful financier (Zo In-sung).

   Yi-ji focuses on Mi-ok (a terrific Jeon Do-yeon) and her husband (Sul Kyung-gu), a couple deeply impacted by the strike that cost the husband his job and put the family under terrible economic duress.

    Possible Love deals with class and the decline of the industrial economy. But Lee is too smart and nuanced to make a political screed or to turn his characters into working-class heroes. He skillfully explores the ways different lives are impacted by an economy marked by uncertainty in the lower rungs and profits in the upper levels. 

   His movie hinges on tensions created by the interaction of individuals and their economic conditions, and, to a lesser extent, of an evolving relationship between a filmmaker and her subjects, but none of the characters are caricatured or locked into stereotypical prisons.

    The working-class couple also has a young son (Jeong Seop) who doesn’t fit in with his schoolmates; it’s as if he — like his parents — has been displaced from his social milieu. He hardly talks. He seems to stand watch over the proceedings like a silent conscience.

    Lee's characters aren’t meant to illustrate sociological observations; they’re living breathing people who are defined not only by class but by the depth with which Lee understands their humanity.

    At two hours and 44 minutes, Possible Love may sound long, but it's absorbing in ways that most movies aren't, unfolding in novelistic fashion without being literary or pretentious.

    Lee includes flashbacks about how Mi-ok and her husband met and about Mi-ok’s childhood. His depiction of the police breaking up the strike that's central to the movie can be brutal to watch. But everything we see in Possible Love feels like it's happening in the present, illuminating something Lee wants us to consider.

    During a therapy session for laid-off workers, one woman offers a poignant account of the joy she felt at being part of the pre-strike community of workers, a sense of belonging she had never experienced and  never expect to feel again.

    Jeon gives the key performance as a woman who, at least initially, thinks the documentary maker might become a friend. When she and Ye-ji interact, they can be like any two women, teasing each other or sharing intimacies, calling each other "sister." But we know that that the relationship between a director and her subjects inevitably harbors hints of exploitation.

    When the two couples vacation together at the wealthy husband’s estate, Lee’s direction becomes increasingly subtle and his characters are more exposed.  Sui's character's impacted anger begins to clarify, as does the businessman-husband's casually expressed sense of entitlement. Mi-ok undergoes a powerful awakening.

     Possible Love demands patience and close observation, but Lee more than rewards us off with a character-based movie that is psychologically astute, aware of the world its characters occupy, and deeply attuned to its characters'  limitations and possibilities.

A comic-book movie tries body horror

 If you have an aversion to gook and gore, you'd do well to skip Clayface, the latest big-screen addition to the DC Comics universe. 

  It may help to think of the movie as a specialty item, an under-hyped comic book offering that mixes body horror and low-grade sci-fi as it streams bloody set pieces through a revenge-oriented tale. 

  Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt Hagen, a handsome actor whose career is about to take a forward leap after  he receives an Oscar nomination. 

  Humbled by recognition but also exhilarated by the possibilities that are about to open for him, Hagen makes a major mistake. He sleeps with the sexy moll (Joana Ribeiro) of a major Gotham mob boss (David Dencik). 

    In an act of brutal revenge, Dencik's Szabo carves up Hagen's face, putting an end to a blossoming career and sending the dejected actor back to the poor Gotham neighborhood where he grew up. Cue the urban decay.

     But wait. There's hope. 

    A research scientist (an appealing Naomi Ackie) has developed a technique to restore damaged flesh. Ackie's Caitlyn warily agrees to help the desperate actor. Of course, Caitlyn's serum -- brace for facial injections -- works. 

    His face restored, Hagen's en route to a career reboot, but results of the procedure prove short-lived. In an effort to sustain his looks, Hagen overdoses on the "miracle" drug, again recovering his looks -- albeit with harrowing side effects. 

    The rest of the movie involves set pieces built around these side effects, which are tied to Hagen's emotions. Let's just say, it's a short leap from anger to lethal revenge. Hagen also can change his appearance at will. When he experiences desire, he seems to become the object of his longing. 

    I didn't say any of this makes sense, but it isn't dull.

    The supporting cast includes Eddie Marsan as Hagen's crooked manager, and Max Minghella as a detective who's engaged to Ackie's character and who complicates Hagen's growing love for the woman he regards as his savior. 

    I wouldn't dig for deeper meaning here. Director James Watkins (Speak No Evil) sticks to the movie's dark surface, unapologetically embracing what feels like a B-movie ethos and gruesome R-rated violence. He may be operating in a narrow niche, but he knows how to fill it. 

   It's worth pointing out that Clayface is destined to become one of Batman's villains, but this Clayface origins story leaves Batman for another day.

   Finally, to provide an example of the movie's squirm-inducing sights, I'll point out that during one of his transitions from man to monster, Hagen's eyelids melt together. He uses a small pair of scissors to cut them apart.  Don't say I didn't warn you.