Hollow Man has some of the coolest special effects I've seen. Too bad the film lives up to its name, offering nothing of substance.
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As I'm watching "Hollow Man," about a team of scientists (one, in particular) obsessed with invisibility, I'm wondering how a plot involving scientific investigation deteriorated so quickly into a teen boy fantasy that involves using invisibility to cop peeks and feels. Then I noticed that it was directed by Paul Verhoeven--the man who gave us "Showgirls" and "Basic Instinct," as well as "Robocop" and "Total Recall"--and I thought, that explains it.
Verhoeven hasn't exactly been above exploitation, and this story is unashamedly exploitive. The Dutch director establishes that early, as in the first four minutes we see both mutilation and titillation. The opening scene shows an invisible force squeezing the crap out of a lab rat in a cage and then a bunch of fanged teeth ripping into it, everything turning blood-red. Moments later, we watch "scientist" Kevin Bacon return home to his apartment, where he oogles a woman in an apartment across the street as she starts to strip down, cheering her on as if his seats were on the 50-yard line. Cue the porno music!
Except that things don't REALLY get gratuitously S&M (make that "sex" and "mutilation") until this scientist becomes his own human guinea pig. Then, rather than becoming curious in a scientific way, he uses the opportunity to unbutton the blouse of the sleeping veterinarian on their team and fondle her exposed breast (now, why she showed up at the lab braless is beyond me). Later, he decides to do something about the strip-show-cut-short across from his apartment. But what he does isn't just the teen-boy fantasy of walking, unseen, into a girl's locker room at watching everyone get undressed. He brutally rapes this woman. Some scientist.
Now, I know we're supposed to see that the invisible gorilla they brought back to visibility went through a restless and violent stage while invisible, but the thing was consistently violent. One minute Sebastian Caine is a rational genius, the next minute he's the baddie in a slasher movie.
It's too bad Verhoeven went for easy sensationalism, because there was a way to do this so it built with more of a sense of sad inevitability, the way film adaptations of "The Invisible Man" and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" have done.
As it is, this one is pretty simple, with a four-character cast that makes the rest of the actors seem superfluous. The "team" that's hoping to win a Nobel Prize for their work on invisibility consists of Caine, former flame and co-worker Linda McKay (Elisabeth Shue), the less-talented Matthew Kensington (Josh Brolin) who's also secretly seeing Linda, and Sarah Kennedy (Kim Dickens), a principled veterinarian onboard to make sure that the animals are well cared for. She's the only one with high principles, it turns out, and that only adds to the clichéd feel of the plot.
A walk through the lab indicates that they've half-cracked the challenge of invisibility. Some of the animals are visible, some are not. Then one evening Sebastian phones Linda in the middle of the night to say he's found the key to reversing invisibility, and they try it out on the poor gorilla, who almost dies. Then, in affirmation of their complete lack of scruples, they by-pass approval channels in order to use Sebastian as the human volunteer.
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[release]22010[/release]