Hollow Man Review
by ChadPolenz AT aol DOT comAugust 16th, 2000
Hollow Man
Don't you hate it when a movie has a great premise and looks like it could be something fresh and exciting it turns out to be just another [insert genre here] flick?
That's what happens with "Hollow Man" - it's a story that involves the discovery of a chemical that turns living things invisible. This would seemingly be a good method to explore human psychology, especially of voyeurism and insecurity. It might also be a study of the basic human fear of that which we can't see scares us. But what do we actually get with this movie - a terribly generic sci-fi/horror thriller about a man who who's just a big baby and has to have his way all the time.
Kevin Bacon stars as Dr. Sebastian Caine - a scientist working on the invisibility project for the pentagon in a secret underground lab. He is surrounded of course by his ex-girlfriend Linda McKay (Elizabeth Shue) who has dumped him for fellow scientist Matt Kensington (Josh Brolin). Caine never gets his way and when he does turn himself invisible he does explore, uh, his "inner perversions." But for some reason he goes nuts and starts killing everybody.
What makes the film so flawed is not just the fact Caine snaps for no justifiable reason, it's that there's no backstory to the any of the characters so no one in the film has any real motivation. This is compounded by a screenplay which does nothing to further the story for the majority of the movie (it's mostly the scientists sitting around in the lab). The topper is the ending which is so over-the-top with one classic slasher horror cliche after another it's laughable. It's a movie about an invisible man and what do we end up with - fistfights and shootouts and explosions and elevators crashing?!?! If we wanted to see that we would have rented a "Die Hard" video.
I think Paul Verhoeven just likes to use special effects at the expense of a workable screenplay.
GRADE: C
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