HOLLOW MAN (Columbia) Starring: Elisabeth Shue, Kevin Bacon, Josh Brolin, Kim Dickens, Greg Grunberg, Joey Slotnick, Mary Randle. Screenplay: Andrew W. Marlowe. Producers: Douglas Wick and Alan Marshall. Director: Paul Verhoeven. MPAA Rating: R (violence, gore, profanity, nudity, adult themes) Running Time: 114 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
HOLLOW MAN follows in the fine tradition of James Whale's 1933 version of THE INVISIBLE MAN, in which Claude Rains loses his mind and goes on a murderous rampage. There is, however, a more realistic element to Paul Verhoeven's contemporary version of the tale: This invisible man tests his power by going around feeling up women. We understand this instinctively to be realistic because it's in the DNA of every heterosexual adolescent male to define invisibility as the power to walk into the girls' locker room with impunity. Hell yes we'd engage in a little mischief if no one could see us; even the best of us might find it hard to resist the temptation. Power corrupts, and so on and so forth.
HOLLOW MAN could have been a provocative examination of what that temptation would do to one of the best of us. Instead, its invisible man is Dr. Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon), an egomaniacal jerk heading a government research project into rendering people invisible, a process that proves much easier than rendering them visible again. After a breakthrough leads to the apparent discovery of a method for reversing the process on test animals, Caine decides to test the invisibility serum on himself, against the protests of his colleagues Linda McKay (Elisabeth Shue) and Matthew Kensington (Josh Brolin). The invisibility serum works on Caine, but the reversal serum is not so successful, stranding Caine in his invisible state. And Caine begins to discover that he kinda likes the freedom it grants him to do virtually anything.
A bunch of techno-babble sets up the notion that the subjects of Caine's serum are "out of phase with the visible universe" blah blah blah, and disappear from the outside in, one layer at a time. And make no mistake about it, it's one heck of a nifty visual trick (actually introduced in reverse when a test ape gradually turns from skeleton into layers of musculature). In fact, HOLLOW MAN is awash in nifty visual tricks cleverly implemented: the thermal view of a full frontal Bacon; a scene of Caine vomiting up invisible food in silent answer to that age-old question; Bacon's ghostly visage appearing in water, smoke and a tossed bag of blood. As effects-heavy thrillers go, this one at least makes every moment of technological gee-whizzery genuinely worth a gee-whiz.
What it lacks, in essence, is anything that can be called a story. There's a vacant spot in the center of the film even before Caine vanishes, because there's nothing remotely sympathetic about him from the outset. While we can still see him, he's an obnoxious sort who makes off-color jokes and mocks the vivisection of his lab animals. Once we can't see him, he's the same guy, only now with the ability to render his obnoxiousness more directly on others. There's no character arc to Sebastian Caine; HOLLOW MAN merely presents the fairly self-evident answer to the question, "What would happen if you granted omnipotence to a cruel, self-absorbed bastard with a God complex?" The script doesn't even give a character arc to its ostensible protagonist, Shue's Dr. McKay. Perhaps she too could have been tempted, or learned something about scientific hubris. But no one learns anything in HOLLOW MAN, except to stay out of the way of an invisible sociopath. Ultimately, it's nothing but a technically proficient mad slasher movie.
Make that a fairly diverting, technically proficient mad slasher movie, at least during its high-energy third act. HOLLOW MAN is giddily gruesome from the outset -- engineered by Verhoeven, the king of giddy gruesomeness -- but it really goes wild once Caine traps his research team in their underground facility. The film turns from a gloss on Cronenberg's THE FLY to a gloss on both ALIEN and ALIENS (though I actually enjoyed the nod to WESTWORLD, with Josh Brolin following in Papa James' footsteps in a cat-and-mouse game involving thermal perception). The final 20 minutes becomes a frantic and generally entertaining hack-n-slash through the supporting cast members, leading up to an appropriately ridiculous climax. It's too bad Verhoeven and screenwriter Andrew W. Marlowe weren't interested in putting some meat on HOLLOW MAN's bones. Even with all its visceral appeal, it could have been so much more interesting to watch the story of the guy who wants to walk into the girls' locker room with impunity, instead of the guy who wants to walk into the girls' locker room and blow it up.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 sick degrees of Kevin Bacon: 6.
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