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People in movies can be awfully dense. Come on, how would you react, and how would you expect any reasonably intelligent person to react, in this situation:
You’re part of an elite team of scientists and technicians working in an ultra-secret laboratory several stories below the streets of Washington, D.C. The expressed goal of your research is to “phase shift out of quantum synch with the visual universe.” The whole shootin’ match is financed by a cabal of scary Pentagon generals.* You’ve succeeded in making several animals invisible, including a gorilla which has been driven at least temporarily insane and carnivorous by the procedure, but are having trouble making them visible again. Your boss, an egotistical genius suffering from delusions of godhood and a marked tendency toward voyeurism, who demands to be the first human being to go transparent, is Sebastian Caine – that’s Caine, the family name of the guy who according to the Bible introduced murder to the human archetype by killing his brother, and Sebastian, a moniker whose pronunciation always gets stretched out by wicked women in movies to six or seven sibilant syllables, as Sarah Michelle Gellar did in Cruel Intentions. To top it all off, the person in charge of capturing your story on film is the director of Showgirls.
Again I ask, if it were you, wouldn’t you immediately catch a flight on the Concorde – wait, bad example, you’re supposed to be smart – wouldn’t you find the quickest way possible to get to the opposite side of the planet before something tragic happened? No, this is a movie, so you’re required to hang around for a couple hours while an unseen naked madman fondles you in the shower.
That’s a fair outline for Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man, an uncredited take on H. G. Wells’s century-old techno-horror novel The Invisible Man. Like the last Wells screen treatment, John Frankenheimer’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, this one opens with a breathtakingly stylish tour de force, then spirals down rapidly as soon as everybody opens their mouths. Only instead of landing on an uncharted atoll, they all sound like they just stepped out of a high school locker room. Or a failed couples-therapy session. Or a failed couples-therapy session in a high school locker room.
It’s not the cast’s fault. Kevin Bacon, who plays Caine, has always been good given the right material (Murder in the First is one of the most wrongfully overlooked films of the last decade). Likewise Oscar-nominated Elisabeth Shue, who plays Linda McKay, Caine’s colleague, former lover and now object of his intramural sexual jealousy. And it’s good to see sadly underemployed actor William Devane again, if just in a bit part (between this and his similarly administrative supporting role in Space Cowboys, all he gets to do is chew gum and die, although for the sake of suspense I won’t reveal which happens in which movie). Problem is, Verhoeven, who’s really gone downhill since Robocop, and screenwriter Andrew Marlowe, who wrote Schwarzenegger’s limp End of Days, conspire less to take an excursion through the mind of a superhuman megalomaniac, as did James Whale’s groundbreaking 1933 filming of The Invisible Man, than spin an elaborate adolescent fantasy (I hope it’s strictly adolescent, anyway). We’re treated to slow, lingering episodes featuring three separate victims of Caine’s ghostly wandering hands (although all three women exhibit a proclivity for baring their midriffs in public, so they’re asking for it, right?).
But – and as Pee Wee Herman said, this is a really big but – the effects are simply amazing. Things have progressed a-ways since Whale helped pioneer methods that lead to today’s green-screen process for optically removing a character from a scene (in his day it was black-screen; Claude Raines, Whale’s star, had his disappearing parts swathed in dark suede). No more of that shaky, hairbrush-on-a-wire stuff. Arduous makeup techniques and computer graphics combine to achieve a genuinely believable vanishing act, and more. The scene in which Caine slowly dissolves, layer by layer, unfolds like a morbidly enthralling technicolor v.r. anatomy textbook...despite the fact that it’s somewhat anticlimactic, since by then we’ve already seen this trick in reverse when the gorilla is made visible again. Even more gripping is the kinetic finale, where inviso-Caine stalks his former friends through the underground lab, outlined in steam, smoke, flames, water, and spraying blood.
Yes, there is a fair amount of viscera on display, and not all of it intact beneath clear human skin. PETA members beware: if rat-munching “Survivors” inflamed your bile, a couple flagrant examples of animal cruelty in Hollow Man might inspire you to boycott its stars and never rent Footloose or Adventures in Babysitting again. But if you’re looking for a fresh adrenaline fix this week, it’s the only way to go. C
*Not that I’m an apologist for the military by any stretch, but just once wouldn’t you like to see a movie where the Army is trying to do something practical for a change, like invent a squeakless windshield wiper, while the evil experiment is being bankrolled by, say, Wal-Mart?
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