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Hollow Man
Directed by Paul Verhoeven; with Kevin Bacon, Elisabeth Shue, Josh Brolin
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As a coming attraction, Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man looked great. Sleek and techno-smart, it glistened on the screen as we saw Kevin Bacon's elegant and smartly-buffed body swirl and tumble from corporeality to invisibility and then back again. Overwrought with liberal doses of yelling and violence, Hollow Man looked like a summer treat that might wash away the bad taste left in your mind from the stupidly sentimental The Perfect Storm, Eddie Murphy's Nutty Professor II (a contemporary minstrel-show of black life), and Robert Zemekis's idiotic What Lies Beneath (which featured Michelle Pfeiffer displaying both of her facial expressions, sometimes even in the same scene). But in its entirety, Hollow Man is, well, pretty hollow. Even worse, it's a squandering of a great topic (and some good talent) and reduces what might have been an interesting, intelligent medical/psychological thriller into that most mundane of middle-class, middlebrow romances: the heterosexual jealousy scenario. Or, "I hate you because you're sleeping with my ex-girlfriend." Yawn.

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One of the promises of Hollow Man was that it was a contemporary redoing of James Whale's great 1933 classic, The Invisible Man, with Claude Rains. Whale, best known for Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, knew how to simultaneously convey horror and humor without ever missing out on something smart to say. His Invisible Man-- based on the 1897 novel by H.G. Wells-- was not only a meditation on the problem of scientists playing God, but a full-fledged attack on the quirks and banalities of "normal" culture. When Rains's doctor, after rendering himself invisible, realizes that he cannot regain corporeality, he goes quite mad with grief. Not only does he take on illusions of grandeur, but considers seriously taking over the world. It is both frightening and very funny, because we can feel both his passion and the sheer impossibility of his desires. He is a noble madman who mirrors our own darkest secrets of revenge. And, of course, because Whale's position as a homosexual found its way into so many of his films-- even the all-American musical Showboat-- it is also possible to read The Invisible Man as a parable of the horrors of the closet as well. All in all a wonderfully satisfying film at 71 minutes.

Hollow Man adds about 45 minutes onto this length, turning Whale's perfect miniature into an overwrought and overblown monstrosity. The plot is still the same: Dr. Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon) is an egomaniacal genius who has discovered how to make flesh disappear from the naked eye. He is working on a top-secret Pentagon project with his ex-girlfriend Linda Foster (Elisabeth Shue) and her current flame, Matt Kensington (Josh Brolin), serving beneath him. They have not-- apparently for very good reason as we see-- told him of their relationship as Linda's expects him to be jealous. Anyway, after experimenting on animals-- in particular a gorilla named Isabel-- they all figure out how to make living creatures invisible and then visible again. So, crazed egomaniac that he is, Caine decides to be the first human guinea pig. And, wouldn't you know it, just like in the original, he can't regain his visible body. This leads to a slight increase in his already hyper, selfish thinking and he becomes a rapist, murderer, and is well on his way to becoming a serial killer as he locks all of his fellow scientists and technicians in the lab and begins slowly slaughtering them. After dispatching four colleagues, Linda and Matt (even their names sound like they should become Prom King and Queen) finally finish him off, and none-too-soon, as our patience is becoming as difficult to see as Dr. Caine himself.

Hollow Man's script, by Gary Scott Thompson and Andrew Marlowe, feels tired. After having contemporized the Whale film, they seem to not know what to do next. A heavy reliance on special effects-- some startling, most predictable-- takes the place of actually creating characters and suspenseful situations. And by the end of the film they simply compile a routine non-stop-hit-parade of the greatest thriller scenes over the past two decades: Alien, Terminator, ReAnimator, Nightmare on Elm Street, whatever. Director Verhoeven films these sequences with a certain amount of verve-- something of a cross between his RoboCop and Show Girls-- but, like those films, they are shallow and empty: all flash and filigree, signifying large budgets and little imagination.

Emotional reality?

But the script problems here go deeper than simple shallowness, because Thompson and Marlow never take the time to make Caine interesting. Whale's mad doctor was tragic before his fall from grace. His idealism was so great in the beginning that it made his manic destructiveness heartbreaking. Here Kevin bacon's Sebastian Caine is simply a self-indulgent, pampered little shit. He is mean-spirited, nasty, misogynist, callous, self-important. There can be no fall from grace here-- ą la Paradise Lost-- because there is no grace anywhere to be found. There are moments when Caine wants to get back with Linda, but they are almost meaningless because he doesn't have a chance. Even he knows he doesn't have a chance, and we are given no space in which to see that he might be a better person, or that he has failed at being a different person. That is why when goes completely crazy after seeing-- in his invisible state-- Linda and Matt boffing one another. Here the film just falls apart: we don't care about his feelings. Even worse, it reduces the plot to almost nothing but a cheap jealous jag.

While Whale's antihero had a girlfriend he lost, the overall texture and intelligence of the film conveyed this defeat as a tragedy. It was precisely his capability to love as a complete human being that made us identity with him. And it is Kevin Bacon's lack of any nuance or warmth that repels us. Not since his earlier films, like Spetters and The Fourth Man, has Verhoeven shown any knack for creating characters-- he is actually at his best with a film like Starship Troopers with its stupid, cartoony visuals and stock TV-mentality characters. Here, once again, we are railroaded with special effects and pre-packaged emotions. In the world of Hollow Man, the fall from grace is simply another big, stupid explosion.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com