Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Hollow Man

Movie Guru Rating:
Bad Karma (2 out of 5)

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That Empty Feeling

Hollow Man lives up to the first word in its title

by Lee Gardner

Hollow Man opens with a shot of a wriggling rat being lowered to a metal floor by a disembodied hand. The camera follows the rat as it scampers away, seemingly free, but contemporary movie conventions, the creepy-crawly score, and the knowledge that this is a Paul Verhoeven film promise otherwise; within a minute, the rat meets a spectacularly gruesome end. The scene has absolutely nothing to do with the film itself. It exists merely to make the audience jump, squirm, and wonder what fate they themselves are being lowered to meet. It would be no surprise to learn that the disembodied hand onscreen was Verhoeven's own.

The savvy filmgoer would expect no less. Since his early career in his native Netherlands, Verhoeven has combined airless technical perfectionism with a penchant for misanthropy, lurid subject matter, and willingness to go places others directors might avoid for reasons of sensibility or taste—from the scissored-off penises of 1983's arty The Fourth Man through campy '90s cineplex fodder such as Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and Starship Troopers. But despite his chronic case of the dark-and-ickys, the director has never failed to entertain on some level. Hollow Man, then, is a first—a Verhoeven film too bad to be a guilty pleasure.

The aforementioned rat meets its maker in a government-sponsored underground lab where brilliant, obsessive scientist Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon) and a small team of doctors and technicians are working on a top-secret formula to make humans invisible. Having perfected the process on lab animals, Bacon insists on running the first human test on himself. Once invisible—and thereby freed of the kind of behavior-checking scrutiny being visible ensures—his megalomania comes into full bloom and his behavior turns menacing. It's up to his colleague and former girlfriend (Elisabeth Shue) and her new boyfriend (Josh Brolin) to stop him.

Stop him from what, exactly, is the unanswered question of Hollow Man. Caine goes from kind of a dick to pure evil incarnate virtually overnight, but Verhoeven fails to make the process of his inner transformation convincing, much less follow through on the grimly tantalizing possibilities of an undetectable, unaccountable id loose in the world. While Caine slips away and commits several heinous acts on various cast members, he returns to the lab for the last act, where Hollow Man turns into a wearying, substandard Aliens knockoff, complete with hapless do-gooders fleeing down dark corridors, hissing steam pipes, and a character shouting "We've got movement!" Despite the provocative ideas behind past Verhoeven movies like Robocop and even Starship Troopers, the director can't seem to think of anything better to do with his invisible man than turn him into a standard movie monster.

Of course this is science fiction, and it's easy to tell thanks to the government-employed scientist who drives a Porsche, the guy who halts an imminent blowjob to talk about work, and the characters who are able to climb a ladder faster than a fiery explosion. The science part provides Hollow Man's lone strong point as CGI effects overseen by Scott E. Anderson deliver eye-popping disappearances and reappearances, as well as Bacon's ghostly image represented in water, steam, etc.

But while the film's computer-generated smoke and empty mirrors do mask some of the sheer preposterousness, they can't distract from a feeble script, a shortage of strong characters, and a director who seems to have spent all his time setting up effects shots. The ever-game Bacon and lumpen acting scion Brolin manage not to look too bad (much easier for Bacon, given the circumstances), but one begins to wish the annoying Shue would just disappear.

It's hard not to feel sorry for Kim Dickens, who was so great in The Zero Effect and a handful of other nearly invisible films and is so ill-used here as a skeptical veterinarian who ends up molested, covered in blood, and terrorized. It's also hard not to feel outraged over the treatment of Rhona Mitra, who, as Caine's hottie neighbor finds herself the object of his invisible lust. But when watching their utter debasement onscreen, it's not Bacon's character for whom one feels loathing. Rather it's the other unseen man, the one behind the camera.