Hollow Man (2000) Elisabeth Shue, Kevin Bacon, Josh Brolin, Kim Dickens, Greg Grunberg, Joey Slotnick, Mary Randle, William Devane. Music by Jerry Goldsmith. Screenplay by Andrew Marlowe, story by Gary Scott Thompson and Marlowe. Directed by Paul Verhoeven. 110 minutes. Rated R, 3 stars (out of five stars)
Review by Ed Johnson-Ott, NUVO Newsweekly www.nuvo.com Archive reviews at http://us.imdb.com/ReviewsBy?Edward+Johnson-Ott To receive reviews by e-mail at no charge, send subscription requests to ejohnsonott@prodigy.net or e-mail ejohnsonott-subscribe@onelist.com with the word "subscribe" in the subject line.
In the opening moments of "Hollow Man," a rat scurries across the floor, then hesitates as it hears ominous growling sounds. Suddenly, the twitching rodent is hoisted into the air by an unseen force and we watch as something takes a huge chunk out of the hovering animal's body. The scene is lurid, technically stunning and quite viscous, perfectly setting the tone for what is to follow.
"Hollow Man," a thriller about an invisible maniac, is a fascinating piece of work despite its flat, obvious script; thanks to top-notch special effects and the skewed perspective of director Paul Verhoeven, the Dutch filmmaker who brought the world "Robocop," "Total Recall," "Basic Instinct," "Showgirls" and "Starship Troopers." Verhoeven is to directing what Spinal Tap is to rock and roll, enthusiastically turning the control knob up to 11 while assaulting viewers with heavy-handed bursts of sex and violence. As with most Verhoeven films, "Hollow Man" is simultaneously campy and creepy. This is a guilty pleasure with the accent on guilty. After the closing credits, I felt an intense need to wash my hands.
Kevin Bacon plays Sebastian Caine, a cocky, but brilliant scientist trying to perfect an invisibility formula for his backers at the Pentagon. SPOILER ALERT: THE FOLLOWING REVEALS BASIC PLOT POINTS. After a successful experiment with a gorilla, Caine decides to skip protocol and try the process on a human being, using himself as the guinea pig. Without the knowledge of government liaison Dr. Arthur Kramer (William Devane), Caine convinces his teammates – ex-girlfriend Linda McCay (Elisabeth Shue), stud muffin Matt Kensington (Josh Brolin) and casualties-waiting-to-happen Sarah Kennedy (Kim Dickens), Carter Abbey (Greg Grunberg), Frank Chase (Joey Slotnick) and Janice Walton (Mary Randle) – to strap him to the table and inject the serum into his veins.
Within seconds, Caine is writhing in agony as he slowly begins to disappear, a layer at a time, in a spectacular visual sequence. His skin fades first, followed by muscles, internal organs and finally his skeleton. After recovering from the trauma, Caine joins his comrades in celebrating their success, but their giddiness turns to dread when attempts to return him to visibility utterly fail.
While his fellow scientists struggle to find a restoration formula, Caine's behavior takes a drastic downward turn. He begins indulging his secret urges; copping a feel from a sleeping female teammate and spying on Linda in the sack. When he makes a trip to the apartment of a voluptuous neighbor, things take a violent, deeply disturbing turn. Whether the serum or his own megalomaniacal tendencies trigger the change is uncertain, but his crew must face the fact that their leader has gone crazy, and their lives may be forfeit if they can't find a way to stop him. END SPOILER ALERT.
Story-wise, "Hollow Man" is just a formula horror flick. In fact, Andrew Marlowe's screenplay fumbles obvious opportunities by mostly confining Caine to the group compound instead of unleashing him on the public. Character development is sketchy at best; the supporting players are one-note and Caine merely slides from being a relatively sophisticated creep to becoming a much more dangerous one.
While the press notes for the film feature impressive quotes about the corrupting nature of power, the movie never addresses them. Make no mistake, "Hollow Man" is simply an exercise in special effects and grisly cheap thrills. But the special effects are knockouts and it's fascinating to watch Paul Verhoeven (to paraphrase Monty Burns from "The Simpsons") wallow in his own directorial crapulence.
Verhoeven grew up in occupied Holland during World War II and witnessed the ravages of war from a child's point of view. During a recent interview, he acknowledged (almost grudgingly) that there is goodness in the human spirit, but made it clear that his interest lies in the dark side of souls.
Boy howdy! Verhoeven movies are veritable orgies of violence and sex, with glossy settings and superhuman characters that treat the death of loved ones lightly (when a scientist's body falls out of a locker, her friends shriek in surprise, but display no sadness whatsoever) and handle grave wounds with remarkable ease (one character sticks her fingers deeply into the stomach wound of a colleague, announces "It didn't cut any organs," and patches him up with duct tape (!!); then the pair continue their very strenuous adventures).
It would be easy to mock or dismiss Verhoeven for the cheesy overkill. In fact, I've done so before, particularly with "Showgirls" and "Starship Troopers." But this time, I kept thinking of that little boy in Holland, forced by German troops to look at piles of dead bodies on the streets. All grown up, he copes with the memories by creating violent films where sexy, extraordinarily powerful humans fight operatic battles against the forces of evil. My interpretation could be wrong, of course, but it sure makes comic book gore-porn like "Hollow Man" a lot more interesting.
© 2000 Ed Johnson-Ott
Paul Verhoeven: The Un-Hollow Man
By Ed Johnson-Ott
As reporters gathered in Los Angeles to interview the cast and crew of the invisible man thriller, "Hollow Man," the topic repeatedly drifted from the spectacular special effects in the movie to the mindset and behavior of its director, Paul Verhoeven. The 62-year-old Dutch filmmaker, best known to American audiences for "Robocop," "Total Recall," "Basic Instinct," "Showgirls" and "Starship Troopers," is dismissed by detractors as a temperamental auteur preoccupied with juvenile displays of lurid sex and graphic violence.
But Verhoeven enjoys a fiercely devoted fan base as well and has received many positive notices from critics, although some are admittedly of the backhanded quality. For example, Andrew O'Hehir of Salon Magazine recently comparing the director favorably to Alfred Hitchcock, stating "Like Hitchcock, Verhoeven is an ice-veined European expatriate whose sleek filmmaking style cannot conceal the fact that he's not in control of his own obsessions. For both directors, male sexual anxiety is at the center of their aesthetic universe, and both have been accused of hating women."
"Hollow Man" star Elisabeth Shue went into the film aware of Verhoeven's reputation, but left the set impressed. "I had a great experience with him," she told me. "He was very supportive of me. He's very demanding and I think some people misinterpret that side of him. But for me, he was demanding in a way that made me feel challenged to do really good work. He's very passionate and I respect that he cares a lot about the films he's done. I would much rather deal with somebody who was mad about their film than somebody who could care less."
Kevin Bacon, the Hollow Man himself, said of Verhoeven, "He has a mercurial kind of personality, he explodes at any minute. He's incredibly passionate. He has a tremendous kind of single-mindedness when it comes to the execution of this movie, to getting the job done. Being a director is a consumptive kind of job ands it requires an amazing amount of focus, which he has. But the people who work with him work with him a lot. The crew, for instance, has done picture after picture with him. He is devoted to them and they are just as devoted to him. Throughout the process, we eventually were able to establish the relationship I like to have with a director, where they respect my opinion about things, about character. I loved working with him."
When Paul Verhoeven finally entered the room for his interview, the energy was palpable. With scraggy white hair and a pleasantly weathered face, he speaks in a thick accent; cordial, but commanding. Verhoeven is quite comfortable holding court, with his booming voice punching every sentence.
The first thing we had to do was clear up an earlier conversation. While promoting "Starship Troopers" with phone interviews three years ago, Verhoeven had insisted to me that the wildly over-the-top feature was absolutely not a satire. It was simply a war movie set in outer space. The only satire was in the film's news broadcasts and propaganda ads, he told me at the time. Now, he wanted to amend his remarks.
"I think there was a misunderstanding," he said. "What I meant was that during the war scenes I am not commenting on it in any, let's say, ironic or satirical way. I'm just basically showing them as they are; they are shot like real war scenes. It's just because of the context, and the juxtaposition with other stuff, and the structure of the movie, that you start to feel… the idea was to put you into the war in a realistic way and then be subversive, to show to you that you were, basically, an idiot and a fool to cooperate. That was the idea. I pull you in and then ask yourself 'Am I an idiot? What is this society and why did I participate in this? Why did I go along with these people?'"
Fair enough. But why do his films always seem to end up dealing with man at his most grim, with death and destruction everywhere? He answered fast, obviously having dealt with this question many times before. "Am I fascinated with showing the dark side? I would say so. In American culture, there is always a tendency to look on the positive side, which is great, but I'm not sure that's the full truth. I think there are a lot of things hidden under the surface in this country, in any country, and sometimes it breaks to the surface. The shadow is there. We all have to deal with the shadow in everybody. How strong and how dominant that will be, probably that's a character thing or an environmental thing. But I've always been interested in that aspect of humanity because you see it displayed in the universe or on Earth in such a brutal way. Especially in the century we just left – I think 70 million people got killed, you know? More than anything you could ever imagine."
Verhoeven spent several minutes rambling on about the brutality of nature, often referring to an article he had read about two galaxies colliding with each other, and the indescribable destruction that must result from such an occurrence. He seemed simultaneously horrified and thrilled while describing the cataclysm. Eventually, his fever pitch softened and he dropped from the nether reaches of space to his own childhood. There was no hint of self-pity as he spoke. He simply got a little quieter.
"I grew up in occupied Holland," he said, "and I saw… there were a lot of people got killed by bombing, or resisters that were shot on the streets by Germans. I was about seven when the war stopped. When I was five, six, seven, we lived in the Hague and were constantly bombed there, not by the Germans, but by the English. Our house was about a mile from the rocket launching pads, where they launched the B-1's and B-2's to England, and the English and Americans were constantly bombing that area. The area around us, with the exception of the street we lived on and a couple of others, were completely destroyed. I remember the flames and the people being killed. And the Germans – one evening I remember walking with my father and suddenly we were held by Germans and they said 'You cannot walk there, you have to walk here and look at something.' And we walked there and saw 20 people they had taken out of prison and shot. They put them against the wall and shot them and made sure that everyone going home passed them. Dead bodies there, yeah, I remember all that. So you may be more optimistic than I am."
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Paul Verhoeven.
© 2000 Ed Johnson-Ott
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