Hollow Man? - hollow indeed. It's no coincidence that this film should be made against the same paranoid backdrop at the turn of the 21st century, as H.G. Wells wrote The Invisible Man at the turn of the 20th. Science is bad, scientists are evil and if you mess with nature you die. The scientist in question is Sebastian Caine (get it? Like in the Bible), the tyrannical project leader who will stop at nothing - animal testing, lying to government - to fulfil his own scientific agenda. His dubious ethics are made painfully clear with him exclaiming "I am God", and it becomes apparent that making a mad transparent gorilla (always a major scientific breakthrough) just isn't enough. So Caine, played by Kevin Bacon, puts himself forward as the first human guinea pig. Naturally, he runs out to cause mischief with his new found ability - groping female colleagues, whispering in peoples ears, raping his neighbour - before deciding to butcher the various disposable geeks who work in his lab.
Presumably, the message here is that if man plays God then he's going straight to hell. This paranoia is complete crap and forms the basis for my aversion to this type of film. Why should we be taking moral lessons from Paul 'Showgirls' Verhoeven? Of course, this might not put everyone off, but these are not Hollow Man's only problems. We get that he's invisible but there's no mention of how, in the overlong finale, Caine becomes both fireproof and immune to the crowbar that gets wrapped around his head. He is, after all, still just a naked scientist. The female lead, played by Elizabeth Shue, unconvincingly turns militant hardbitch, fashioning a flamethrower from a fire extinguisher and (eventually) faces Caine down in the finale. Most of the action takes place in the underground laboratory, robbing the film of any sense of wider spectacle and place, so that all those questions of identity and the wider society that pervade Well's novel simply don't exist. The special effects are good but so what? As a wise man once said, "you can't buff shit".
If you're going to make a cash-cow, make one with a brain. Thankfully, we can increasingly point to examples of massive studio budgets being spent with intelligence and artistry, but Hollow Man is not one of these. This bollocks should be filtered out from the much more interesting and worthwhile recent Hollywood stuff, so if you want escapism and fantasy, watch the excellent X-Men. Watch this film, but quickly forget it |
