Hollow Man has substance. A group of scientists, working for the Pentagon, believe they have perfected a method of shifting a person back and forth between visibility and invisibility. Sebastian Caine, the cocky, high-strung leader of the group, insists on being the first human to use the procedure. Unfortunately, while the procedure works perfectly at turning Caine invisible attempts to reverse the effect prove futile. Worse, the longer he stays invisible the more unstable Cain becomes and when madness turns to murder how will Caine�s colleagues stop what they cannot see?
Hollow Man is a very good science fiction/horror film with excellent special effects and good acting, but the script could have used a little work. Hollow Man�s biggest failing is that it eventually slides into what has become a clich� in horror films of having a cast of victims, none of whom are going to survive other then the primary characters, being picked off one at a time by some monster/killer in various gruesome ways. Worse, and again like many modern horror films, the cast of victims all act as though they haven�t got the brains God gave a goose as they practically line up to be eliminated. For example, Caine�s colleagues have infrared goggles with which they could see Caine despite his invisibility, but do they use them? Well, yeah, kind of half way, but they also spend a great deal of time with the goggles pushed up on top of their heads or in another room while Caine picks them off one at a time. And of course the worse clich� is that while being pursued by a killer, an invisible killer at that, each character insists on going off alone making it easy of course for them to be picked off. The scientists outnumbered Caine six to one so had they remained calm, worn their infra red goggles and stayed together it�s unlikely that Caine would have been able to do the damage he did within the relatively tight confines of their research facilities. Another problem I had with Hollow Man is that Caine seemed to be invulnerable as well as invisible since no matter what the scientists did do to him he pretty much shrugged it off. At various points Caine is clubbed on the head with a pry bar, flamed repeatedly with a make shift flame-thrower and electrocuted only to get up again with no ill effects and resume his attack. This is yet another of the modern horror film cliches, that of the unstoppable monster ala Michael from the Halloween movies or Jason out of the Friday the 13th franchise. But what works with those films hurt Hollow Man since an invisible man is more interesting as a subtle threat then an unstoppable one.
While I�m complaining there were two other mistakes I noted. The first is that if Caine was completely invisible, including his eyes, then how did he see? Sight is based on light striking the inside of the eye, but an invisible eye would simply allow light to pass through it rendering the invisible person sightless. Second, it was established early in the film that access to the elevator which carried the scientists to their facilities was possible only after each person�s fingerprint had been scanned by a security device. Caine, to the consternation of his colleagues, insisted on coming and going from the facility, but if he was invisible how did the security device scan his fingerprint to re-admit him?
Still, despite these complaints Hollow Man was a fairly good movie. Where it worked best was during Caine�s forays outside the research facility, such as during Caine�s attack on his neighbor, when people who didn�t know they were dealing with an invisible man were involved. This is what I meant by an invisible man should be more subtle a threat then unstoppable as evidenced by Caine�s neighbor knowing she was not alone in her apartment, but being unable to reconcile what she could feel with what she could see. This was probably the nicest, and most chilling, part of the film. Some of the ethical questions raised during Hollow Man were interesting as well such as when one character asks the homicidal Caine if it were a side effect of the invisibility serum that made him insane or the sense of power that came from being invisible. Elizabeth Shue did her usual fantastic work though by the end of the film her character had jury-rigged so many weapons and devices I had begun to think of her as a female McGuyver. The other actors did excellent work as well, but Kevin Bacon, as Caine, could have put more of an edge into Caine�s character then he did. Not that he did a bad job, but on one hand the other characters regularly talked about how arrogant and obnoxious Caine was while Bacon was playing him, at least until he became invisible and unstable, as a more sympathetic character then that. The special effects were fantastic especially those during the scenes in which Caine and some of the test animals were made invisible or visible. Their bodies disappeared or reappeared one layer at a time, almost like a biology exhibit, during which their veins would reappear followed by bones, muscle, skin and hair. Visually this was very impressive.
So go to Hollow Man and don�t wait too long or it could well disappear before you see it.
Grade: A-
