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Look Ma, no hands! Also no ears, elbows, toes or kidneys. Yes, the always enjoyable Invisible Man theme is back and answers the age-old question, what is the best role for Kevin Bacon? One where you don't see him. Hollow Man is the story of jerk scientist Kevin Bacon who becomes jerk invisible man Kevin Bacon. Once invisible, he starts killing everyone, because, remember, he's a big jerk. This movie is bad. Don't see it. The only thing worth anything are the effects. Kevin really does look invisible. But you know what? So did Chevy Chase in Memoirs of an Invisible Man, and that's a much better movie. Why is this movie bad? Have a seat, this may take a while. SCRIPT: I've seen better dialogue in a Ginsu Knives infomercial. From the very first scene, you find yourself squirming over the attempted hipness of the characters. And what are the characters thinking? "We've got an invisible man running around. We can only see him with these visors. Let's try to get him without wearing the visors for a while, see how we do." "You're lying frozen on the ground, so I'm gonna build this fire above you and it'll thaw you out, hopefully ignoring the fact that heat rises." "As you can see, we haven't been able to make the stuff work properly on humans yet. But we'll keep trying. Maybe next time we'll get it to work on the computer before we pump it into you."ACTING: Wasn't Elisabeth Shue nominated for an Academy Award once? You'd never know it by watching this. My guess is, she only had a thimble full of acting ability in her, and she used every last drop of it up in Leaving Las Vegas. I've seen traffic lights with more life in them then her. Elisabeth Shue playing an intelligent scientist is simply batty, didn't we learn anything from The Saint? As for the rest of the cast, well no one will ever confuse Kevin Bacon with Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino, but he's at least palatable. Meanwhile Josh Brolin and the various unimportant eventual corpses do their best to make their ridiculous lines sound meaningful. They fail. DIRECTING: Paul Verhoeven has directed good movies (Total Recall, RoboCop, Basic Instinct), passably entertaining movies (Starship Troopers) and real dogs (Showgirls). But in all of them, he has a thing for naked breasts. From the three-breasted hooker in Total Recall to the co-ed shower scene in Starship Troopers to the entire ill-advised production of Showgirls he likes to watch the booby bounce. So there's a lot of bouncing booby in this picture. And since the guy making the booby bounce is usually invisible, there's no pesky male in the shot to ruin the mood, booby simply rises and falls to its own rhythm. But aside from his anatomy fixation, Verhoeven has little to contribute. The flick is choppy, bland, sterile, predictable and stupid. But that's just my opinion. Actually, no, that was the entire theater's opinion, as we were laughing and giggling at some very supposedly dramatic scenes throughout the flick. To sum up. Hollow Man is bad. The only people who will enjoy it at all are the true effects geeks or people who want to watch breasts massage themselves. I'm giving it 1 Babylon. The Ginsu Knives informercials get 2, just to give you a frame of reference. Lest it goes unnoticed, there are also several scenes that contain Kevin Bacon's penis. This, after Wild Things - he's becoming a regular Harvey Keitel. Hollow Man |
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