The Dutch-born director Paul Verhoeven, who has been working in Hollywood for more than a decade now, is capable of making interesting films – especially when he can humanise a machine, as he did in RoboCop, or mechanise people, as he did in Starship Troopers. In Total Recall, he worked well with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is practically a machine, though he was unable to humanise Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct.
Unfortunately, Verhoeven’s new film, Hollow Man, does not offer him much scope for any of his persistent concerns (except voyeurism). As with so many big-budget films, the problem is that a credible script has been neglected in favour of special effects. The computer-generated imagery is indeed impressive in a gross-out kind of way, and some of the action is mildly frightening, but otherwise there isn’t much in this rather, er, hollow film.
Kevin Bacon (gosh, hasn’t he come a long way since Flashdance?) plays Sebastian Caine, an egomaniacal scientist who, with his team, is working in an underground bunker on achieving invisibility. That is, he is trying to “phase shift” various creatures “out of synch with the quantum universe”. Don’t you love it? This procedure has worked on some dogs, monkeys and the odd chimp, but now the big challenge is to do it to a human.
They are funded, of course, by the Pentagon – which must pay them very well, since Dr Caine drives a Porsche, and Elizabeth Shue, playing a babe-scientist as she did in The Saint, drives a gold Mercedes Sports. The Pentagon wants results, but Caine’s research isn’t quite there yet, so he decides to undergo the invisibility procedure himself, and we see each layer of his body, from the skin down to the skeleton, being stripped away as they become invisible.
Getting him back in synch with the quantum universe, however, proves difficult. Moreover, the experience of being unseeable pushes his egomania into psychosis and, with the help of some very emphatic point-of-view camerawork, he starts getting up to all sorts of bad things, like groping a neighbour’s enhanced breasts. It’s a pity there isn’t more of this sort of shenanigan, helping us feel what it would be like to have the weird power of invisibility. That would have been really creepy, but Verhoeven doesn’t seem very interested in exploring this.
The movie rattles around a set of well-used plot strands (besides the old Invisible Man one), going from the scientist-playing-God plot to the killer-on-the-loose-in-an-enclosed-area plot, the gotta-get-out-of-here plot, and finally the can’t-quite-kill-the-monster plot that was so effective in The Terminator. It is sometimes tense, but it is often just laughable – as laughable as when the scientists, in mid-procedure, declaim portentously that “the serum is irradiated”, irresistibly reminding one of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
There is potential in the kind of bio-terror to which Hollow Man aspires, but it needs a director like David Cronenberg to tease out all its possibilities. Verhoeven’s film-making has a kind of comic-book verve, but that’s not enough to make Hollow Man more than a video for when you feel like something mindless and trashy. Despite its anatomically interesting effects, it just doesn’t have much flesh on its bones.