Hollow Man Review
by Christopher Null (cnull AT mindspring DOT com)August 4th, 2000
HOLLOW MAN
A film review by Christopher Null
Copyright 2000 filmcritic.com
filmcritic.com
Okay, Kevin Bacon! You're invisible and you can't go back to being
visible -- what do you do!?
Well, you spy on some naked chicks, right? That's what I'd do!
That's what every guy would do, right!
Paul Verhoeven's latest homage to Big Acting and overdirection is
light on the naked chicks and heavy on the violence, because, as it
turns out, being invisible makes you insane and clearly Mad With Power.
And the chicks just get in the way of that.
I guess I'm getting ahead of myself. The Invisible Man gets a
millennial upgrade to Hollow Man, when a team of government-contracted
scientists led by Kevin Bacon's Sebastian Cole figures out how to "phase
shift" (ahem) a person to become completely invisible. As we are told
during one briefing, the phase shifting is the easy part (of course).
It's undoing the process and making someone visible again that's tricky.
When Cole successfully un-phase shifts a gorilla, he figures, what
the hay, he'll try it on himself. All goes well until, oopsy, the
un-shifting doesn't work on humans! As Cole simmers as an invisible man
trying to figure out how to revisible-ize, stuck at the lab -- located,
quite naturally, in a pit dug hundreds of feet into the earth and with
only one exit -- he starts to go crazy.
To be honest, even the most bored observer will see that Cole was
crazy to begin with, and it comes as no surprise when he starts offing
his staff, who are threatening to tattle about the illegal/unethical
human trial to their Pentagon benefactors. Most notable among them is
Linda (Elisabeth Shue), an ex-girlfriend who's now having a fling with
another researcher named Matt (Josh Brolin).... Two guys out of four on
staff? Linda must be the trampiest medical professional on film to
date.
For good and for bad, Verhoeven avoids the ambition of grandiose
movies like Starship Troopers, and Hollow Man ends up taking place
mostly in the budget-friendly underground cave -- just like any number
of "trapped on a ship" sea monster movies, only with no water and an
invisible monster.
To say that Kevin Bacon is a ham in this film would be insulting to
pigs. (Insert your own "bacon" joke here.) While Shue makes a more
credible scientist here than she did in The Saint, it's still a stretch
to see her in a role that isn't either a prostitute or a babysitter.
But ultimately, Hollow Man is simply a paean to some dazzling
special effects, the sophistication of which I don't think I've ever
seen -- mind-bending in their complexity, blood curdling in their
goriness, and almost unthinkable in their realism. There's
water-covered invisible man, burning invisible man, and blood-spattered
invisible man. The capper of course is the phase shift process, one of
the more gruesome events ever put to film, and not merely because of the
prominence of Bacon's skin-stripped male member. Of course, never mind
the ersatz scientific holes (mainly, if you un-phase shift from the
inside-out, why do you phase shift from the outside-in? -- the serum
still starts in your veins and works through the body that way).
Whatever. Hollow Man is disturbing enough to be fun, and utterly
dumb enough to not get in the way of the former. Just like that other
Verhoeven classic. You know: Showgirls.
RATING: ***
|------------------------------|
\ ***** Perfection \
\ **** Good, memorable film \
\ *** Average, hits and misses \
\ ** Sub-par on many levels \
\ * Unquestionably awful \
|------------------------------|
MPAA Rating: R
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Producer: Alan Marshall, Douglas Wick
Writer: Andrew W. Marlowe
Starring: Kevin Bacon, Josh Brolin, Kim Dickens, Greg Grunberg, Mary Jo
Randle, Elisabeth Shue, Joey Slotnick
http://www.spe.sony.com/movies/hollowman/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=filmcriticcom&path=subst/video/sellers/amazon-top-100-dvd.html Movie Fiends: Check out Amazon.com's Top 100 Hot DVDs!
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