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Hollow Man review
:. Director: Paul Verhoeven
:. Starring: Kevin Bacon, Elisabeth Shue
:. Running Time: 1:52
:. Year: 2000
:. Country: USA
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Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Robocop, Starship Troopers) is one of Hollywood's bad seeds. Alone or with his cohort screen writer Joe Eszterahas, he has always played as the antithesis of Hollywood through his provocative, even deviant, big budget B movies. His take on the subject of invisibility accompanied by great special effects was a good omen. Nevertheless, the illusion would be short-lived.
Kevin Bacon plays a megalomaniac genius who decides to test his "invisibility formula" on himself. His universe is summed up by a group of researchers that includes Elisabeth Shue, his ex-girlfriend for whom he still harbors an obsession. He is cold and cynical and though he may have respect for his peers from a scientific point of view, he is far from being human. The invisibility that suddenly gives him the power to do what he wants (like God) and rather than satisfying his ego, allows the evil that wakes within him to escape.
The story takes off well enough. Though invisibility has always been treated in a positive way, it's clear that everyone has fantasized about the possibilities that being invisible would bring. What would we be capable of if we were invisible and unable to be caught is a question whose answer is far from being certain. That's the angle that Verhoeven chooses, even though his hero already has from the beginning a mean disposition. He begins with amusing himself with his gift and rapidly sinks into a voyeurism and violence that attests to the madness in which slips. The film is vicious in the fact that it submits the audience to the same desires and temptations of the main character and confronts them with their own demons. Alas, everything stops there. There where the film could have lingered on the scientist's psychological conflicts and gone to the root of his thoughts, it suddenly takes an insupportable turn to action and suspense, all taken straight out of Alien! The second half of the film justifies its big budget by vulgarly tantalizing the summer masses starving for big thrills. Here the audience has a right to a chain of explosions, blood, and manhunts in laboratory hallways that strangely resemble a spaceship. There are such grotesque and unpalatable scenes—count how many times the bad guy you thought was dead reappears—that they annihilate the good idea at the beginning and completely drown Hollow Man.
Though Verhoeven has always been inclined towards B movies, most of his films have always had at least an edge thanks to his very personal vision and his taste for provocation (sex, violence and vices of all genres) that opposed themselves to the sterilized productions of Hollywood. While that provocation is present in Hollow Man, just like his hero who succumbs to his own power—invisibility—Paul Verhoeven succumbs to his own power—money—to offer us a spectacle that he has always disdained. We're far from the biting Flesh and Blood, Splatters, and his other European films.
As for the actors, while Bacon has a naturally vicious side that fits his character (As usual, he generously reveals his anatomy to us), Elizabeth Shue is almost as convincing and charismatic as a scientist as Denise Richards was not in The World Is Not Enough.
Hollow Man is a film where only the special effects sometimes create an illusion.
Fred Thom
 Movie Reviews: from 1998 to 2011
Reviews since 2012
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