DIRECTOR
Paul
Verhoeven
SCREENWRITER
Andrew
W. Marlowe
STORY
BY
Gary
Scott Thompson
Andrew W. Marlowe
PRODUCERS
Alan Marshall
Douglas Wick
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Jost Vacano
MUSIC
Jerry Goldsmith
EDITOR
Mark Goldblatt
CAST
Elisabeth Shue (Linda McKay)
Kevin Bacon (Sebastian Caine)
Josh Brolin (Matthew Kensington)
Kim Dickens (Sarah Kennedy)
Greg Grunberg (Carter Abbey)
Joey Slotnick (Frank Chase)
Mary Randle (Janice Walton)
William Devane (Dr. Howard Kramer)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 112m
U.S. release: August 4, 2000
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
Other Paul
Verhoeven films
reviewed on this website:
- Showgirls
- Starship
Troopers
|
Any
movie calling itself Hollow Man dares to make itself the
biggest critics' target since A Goofy Movie. You'd think
the filmmakers would do whatever they could to avoid cheap shots
-- by making the lead character as complex and human as possible.
But no. This is yet another multi-million-dollar Hollywood thriller
that has plenty of time for elaborate special effects (many of
which are eye-popping) but very little time for characterization.
The movie could be called Hollow People.
Does that matter? Do we go to see a big-budget invisible-man
movie for its profound understanding of the human struggle? No,
and if we agree we're not here for that, then the movie had better
at least be fun. Roughly the first half of Hollow Man
is agreeably trashy, like an over-amped remix of David Cronenberg's
The Fly crossed with John Carpenter's Memoirs of an
Invisible Man. But once we see where it's going -- a showdown
between the protagonist/villain and a rapidly dwindling team
of former colleagues in a locked-down lab -- we may sink into
our seats in frustration. All this magical computer-generated
whiz-bang, and they can't do more with it than a climax ripping
off your choice of slasher movies and Alien films?
Kevin Bacon, the poor guy, has written an engaging two-part Hollow
Man diary for Entertainment Weekly detailing the nightmarish
preparations -- the smelly latex, the tedious hours of CGI mapping
-- he had to endure to play the lead, Sebastian Caine, a military
scientist looking for a way to make people invisible. Bacon went
through such hell for the role that it almost breaks my heart
to say all his effort comes to very little. It's not his fault;
the script (by Andrew Marlowe, of Air
Force One and End
of Days) won't let him develop Sebastian in any meaningful
way. He goes from being a two-dimensional obsessed scientist
to a two-dimensional psycho once he's invisible.
Sebastian's loyal crew of scientists, including former flame
Elisabeth Shue and her new lover Josh Brolin, are worried about
him: They can't find a way to make him visible again, and we've
seen that lab animals who went invisible for too long became
aggressive and violent. So, too, does Sebastian, who very quickly
devolves from a voyeur and groper to a possible rapist-murderer
(he pays a visit to a nearby woman; we never find out exactly
what he does to her). Psychologically, Sebastian's shift into
evil might make better sense if he were a sexually repressed
nerd, a loser jealous of his ex-lover's new boyfriend, but Bacon
plays the pre-invisible Sebastian as a virile scientist hunk
simmering in his own ego. So we don't feel that being invisible
puts him in touch with his id, his darkest unacknowledged desires.
The unfairly ignored Memoirs of an Invisible Man, structured
as a comedy, nevertheless tapped into curious areas of sadness
as well as prurience; this may be the only time in film history
that Chevy Chase has given a better dramatic performance than
Kevin Bacon. The moment when Daryl Hannah renders Chase visible
by gently applying foundation to his face is absurdly moving,
and Hollow Man could have used more human touches like
that. Instead, Bacon stalks around behind an expressionless latex
façade, further underscoring Sebastian's indebtedness
to masked slasher-film psychos. Well, John Carpenter did that
better, too.
Granted, you don't expect subtlety from director Paul Verhoeven,
the man who gave us RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic
Instinct, Showgirls,
and Starship
Troopers -- most of which (I exclude the clownish Showgirls)
are cheerfully over-the-top, winking at themselves and at the
audience, and highly enjoyable. I don't see Hollow Man
joining the Verhoeven pantheon of well-loved trash. The becoming-invisible
and becoming-visible-again scenes have some of Verhoeven's charged-up
showmanship; the rest of the movie is a lumbering haunted-house
flick with an oddly sour, vindictive tone. Did Verhoeven think
he was taking the moral aspects of invisibility seriously?
A serious movie doesn't give us peeks at naked women, as if we
were pubescent boys, and a serious movie doesn't have Elisabeth
Shue announce "We're gonna take him down" and punctuate
it by cocking her gun. I like Verhoeven's cheese as much as anyone,
but this movie is the wrong kind of cheese. |
