The Gotham City of Clayface doesn’t look too much like Gotham City. It’s a yellow, over-tungstened, sparsely graffitied Scorsese theme park, a little too shiny and a little too computer-generated, and bereft of shadows you’d conceivably believe someone called Bane or Poison Ivy might lurk in.

The film boasts an interesting premise, framing the origins of traditional Batman antagonist Clayface, who can mould his appearance into whatever and whomever he likes, as a body-horror tragedy. It’s a DC Comics take on Bessel van der Kolk’s famous thesis The Body Keeps the Score , in which residual trauma stores itself via physical manifestation, coupled with a breakout turn by Welsh actor Tom Rhys Harries.

Yet James Gunn and Peter Safran’s newly established DCU has shot itself slightly in the foot here by having Clayface revisit the Liverpool locations of Matt Reeves’s Robert Pattinson Batman (with the occasional side quest to Manchester).…