HOLLOWMAN No Entombed on the soundtrack AGAIN? First the X-Men, now this? Jesus Christ, people, what the hell is wrong with you? The big problem with this movie is that it wants to be too many things at the same time, and they end up canceling each other out. The characters are just barely likeable enough that it pisses us off when (uh-oh) End Of Days writer Andrew W. Marlowe's script (some story credit to Gary Scott Thompson) can't think of anything to do with them other than kill them. The plot, old as it is, is intriguing enough to frustrate us when it degenerates into a slasher movie. The effects are inventive and convincing enough to drive us batty when the best ones are used at the beginning of the film, and the rest of the movie ends up using just variations on a theme. But most of all, it's just too unpleasant to be much fun. Hollowman's opening twenty or so minutes are easily the best parts of this movie, both because of the "little things" (like the first scene where a rat is let into a seemingly empty cage, and...) and more obviously memorable set pieces. Kevin Bacon plays Dr. Sebastian Caine, a brilliant (and equally arrogant) scientist working with his team on turning living animals invisible for the Pentagon. Turning them invisible is easy, as it turns out; it's making them visible again which is the hard part. Unwilling to give up control of the project, he doesn't let his bosses know when he successfully manages to bring a gorilla back from invisibility and cons the rest of his team (almost all young and good-looking, including ex-lover Elizabeth Shue [sporting a really cute haircut], and her new guy [Josh Brolin]) into doing it all to him. And...guess what. Verhoeven's sci-fi movies have historically had an extremely wry satirical streak through them, satire which was always fun without being preachy because it never really had anything to say; it just took existing absurdities and cranked 'em up to eleven. No such satire is present here; Hollowman has a sense of humor (often self-conscious, but likeably so, like when Jeremy Slotnick gives a god-like warning of the consequences of mankind treading where it shouldn't), but presents itself with a completely straight face, to both its credit and detriment. You can't be thrilling (in the way this movie wants to thrill) without being fun, and this movie's just no fun at all. You can be disturbing without being fun, but this movie never seems to indicate that it was ever made with that intention, and that only makes it more disturbing and less fun, and none of it in a good way. Certainly, the best thing about this movie has to be the special effects...at least early on. The scene where the gorilla is "brought back" isn't just cool, it's one of the coolest things I've ever seen, in a movie or otherwise. Seriously, this gets into my all-time top ten, right up there with monkeys in the wild in Brunei, and that guy accidentally setting his hair on fire with a hash pipe at a concert in 1989. If you like seeing imaginative, inventive effects in the movies, this movie's pretty much worth owning for that scene alone. Bacon's transformation into invisibility isn't quite as neat, but it's pretty cool too. Unfortunately, after that, it's generally scrambling hard to avoid showing what other invisible-man movies have done in the past. This means using CGI to show us a number of cool things that nobody's been able (or been able to afford) to do before, but it's all kind of samey; Bacon's face in a puff of smoke, Bacon's face in a cloud of carbon dioxide, Bacon's face splashed with water. It's been a while since an invisible-man movie has hit the big screen; Full Moon made a couple, but the last one I can think of is Carpenter's Memoirs Of An Invisible Man. Hollowman tries hard to avoid stepping on Memoirs' toes; even the invisible-vomiting scene is done in a different way. There are a lot more problems here. This batch of actors is, generally speaking, a pretty likeable bunch. This is, of course, usually a good thing. The cast is all good, particularly Bacon, whose casting is an ideal choice because of his gaunt, skull-like face which makes the scenes where you kinda see him in a puff of smoke or the shower of fire sprinklers all the more creepy, at least before they spiral into repetitiveness. And I also liked Kim Dickens a little more than the others; she gets a good scene late in the film where she finds an inventive use for several bags of blood. But this is a movie which turns into a slasher movie in its last forty or so minutes, and we all know how slasher movies go. It's frustrating to see characters we actually like enough to want to hear them talk...and then they're needlessly killed one by one because the script doesn't know where else to take things. Not helping things is the latex mask that's poured over Sebastian's head when it becomes clear that he isn't going to become visible again through normal procedure; his resemblance (when wearing the mask) to one Michael Myers only reinforces the notion that this is just a slickly done slasher movie with some nifty set pieces. But slashers can be fun. Not so much this one. On top of the cruel way the characters we actually get to know are handled, there's a recurring theme of sexual predation which I think is badly mishandled. The one scene where Sebastian gropes Dickens's breast makes sense, is creepy (if unpleasant), and isn't ENTIRELY gratuitous, like Shue's dream sequence later on, let alone the scene with his pretty neighbor. The scene where the invisible Sebastian rapes his pretty neighbor (Rhona Mitra, blessedly making good on the promise of her lovely cleavage, oft-shown in Beowulf) is one of those screamingly bad mistakes which manages to singlehandedly bring the whole movie down a big notch. It's not just disturbing because you know he'll get away with it - think about this for a second. This poor woman won't even be able to tell a rape crisis counselor or anyone about this, because they'll think she's stark raving mad. So she's going to have to deal with this alone. And it gets worse. She doesn't know that it was an invisible but otherwise flesh-and-blood man who did it, and doesn't know that said man probably isn't going to survive to the end of the movie. She doesn't know WHAT the hell did this, and has no reason to believe that it isn't still out there. So basically, she's going to be afraid of being alone for the rest of her life. She's probably not even going to feel safe when other people are around. This doesn't just mess around with all the things that rape normally messes around with, this messes around with her fundamental notions of reality. That is, to put it mildly, fucked up beyond all belief, and crosses the line between being disturbing in a good, thought-provoking way, and disturbing in a bad, bothersome way; after this happened, it bothered me for the rest of the movie. Sebastian faces no consequences of this act, and the movie doesn't have Mitra return (or be mentioned) for the rest of the film; we just never hear anything about her again. The plot has a lot of goofy holes and contrivances, nothing new for a Verhoeven movie. I can't imagine any sane person willingly entering a cage with an angry invisible gorilla, and for that matter, the long-time invisibility problem of "how is it we're seeing through dust and detritus on the invisible man's skin?" is given a whole new bothersomeness when applied to animals as hairy as gorillas and dogs. Verhoeven's movies have always had a disregard for the laws of physics which might be annoying in more ignorant hands but is actually kind of amusing to see come from somebody with a PhD in math and physics. Here, we get to see a pretty clever, if not actually plausible, escape from a freezer (however unlikely it is that they'd be storing in the freezer what they're storing), but we also get that elevator scene. (must...resist...temptation...to say "Will the real Paul Verhoeven please stand up?") The IMDb "goofs" page for this movie is the biggest I've ever seen, perhaps saying less about the movie itself than about the way internet-type-people have long given Verhoeven's movies a pretty rough time. I can't help but think Hollowman might have actually added up to a good movie if about a half hour was cut from its 117 minute running time down to a trimmer hour and a half. Cut down on the relationships in the lab (particularly Shue and Brolin, whose behind-Sebastian's-back romance doesn't really go anywhere), and don't show us what Sebastian does when he goes out for the night (the movie seems determined to make sure Shue and Brolin have our primary sympathies; a poor decision, but one that should've been followed through with more). And for chrissakes, get rid of the rape scene; I liked seeing Mitra's boobs, but not at the price of doing this much damage to the movie. For sure, it wouldn't have added up to a GREAT movie if cut down like that. After all, for all of his oft-discussed genius, Sebastian Caine reveals himself to be a man of little imagination when once he becomes invisible, all he can think of to do is kill people and molest women - as if knowing he's in a movie, he even plants a bomb at the climax to blow everything up, for no apparent reason. Hollowman, as designed, was never going to be anything more than a well-made slasher movie with some awesome effects, but that's not a bad thing; it'd still be a good movie. As it is, though, it ain't. Great Jerry Goldsmith score, though. BACK TO THE H's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE