Hollow Man

HOLLOW MAN

Rating: C-
Paul Verhoeven films such as Robocop, Total Recall, and Starship Troopers, when they weren't being ruined by gratuitous violence, had an air of grandeur about them that screamed "large-scale production". So it comes as a surprise that his latest effort Hollow Man is such a minor, small-scale affair. Watching it, you'll be reminded more of low budget slasher films than heady science fiction.

Kevin Bacon leads a team of researchers attempting to uncover the secrets of rendering a human invisible. Elisabeth Shue is his bright-eyed assistant with a hairdo that looks like she drove to work in a convertible at 80 miles per hour. She used to love him, but now she sees right through him, and she's turned her attentions to another member of the team. Love triangles never work out well, particularly when one of the parties becomes a power-hungry lunatic.

As Bacon tells his Pentagon funders, making someone invisible is a piece of cake (I honestly didn't realize this). The hard part is making that person visible once more. As a result, their lab is full of a menagerie of animals which have been rendered transparent and now await rematerialization. When the team finally succeeds in bringing a gorilla back (Shue defibrillating a thrashing gorilla as it slowly reappears, vein by vein, muscle fiber by muscle fiber, is perhaps the highlight of the movie), Bacon decides it's time to try the trick himself. He probably should have waited for one more test. When he prepares to receive the injection which will render him invisible, he enters the lab nude. This provides Verhoeven the opportunity to have Shue and another female ogle Bacon with sly smiles on their faces. But why, exactly, would Bacon have to be nude for the experiment? Or am I just being a killjoy?

If only Mr. Bacon had performed a literature search like a conscientious scientist, he would have discovered what Claude Rains and every other invisible man since has learned the hard way: the formula always contains some ingredient which drives a man bonkers. No matter how distinguished and upstanding you start out, once you become invisible you'll have nothing on your mind beyond secretly watching the stacked babe in the neighboring apartment remove her clothes.

Which is the major problem with this movie. Screenwriter Andrew Marlowe can't think of anything interesting to do with the concept of invisibility beyond the standard voyeurism shtick. Even that scene has a problem; it cuts away just as Bacon lays hands on the frightened woman, and the movie never tells us whether he just scares her, rapes her, kills her, or takes her out for coffee and doughnuts. The whole scene is just dropped and forgotten about. At another point, there's a hint of developing the theme that Bacon's inability to rematerialize means he can no longer interact with others on a human level. The very source of his unusual power - the ability to walk among others undetected - is also a source of insurmountable alienation. This idea has some interesting pathos worth exploring, but no sooner is the subject broached than the filmmakers recoil from it as if they'd touched a hot stove.

Instead, the climax of the movie comes down to members of the research team hunting Bacon through the corridors of the lab with dart guns. As the members are killed one by one in bloody fashion, leaving Shue to fend for herself, you'll feel like you're watching Halloween instead of Hollow Man. The whole thing seems very claustrophobic, and very low budget.

Those of you who groan everytime someone outruns an explosion in a Hollywood movie should probably bypass this film altogether. There's a scene where an explosion is rising up an elevator shaft but then stops right before it reaches our heroes. Just plain out comes to a halt. I think screenwriters should be required to at least pass high school physics, don't you?