Posted: 08/08/2000

Hollow Man

(2000)

by Hank Yuloff

A potential shocker from the same guy who gave us such scary films as Basic Instinct and Showgirls.

WARNING! Spoiler ahead…

In an age where movie magic is becoming more and more complex, it’s possible for a movie to hide behind the magic like the great Oz and his curtain. There can be no doubt about it; you’re seeing this movie for the special effects. Hollow Man is the struggle lost by a man who is shown his worst side, but in this case he is shown… nothing, because he is invisible. How’s that for a freshman English paper: compare and contrast, etc. The trouble here is that the comparisons all show this movie to be, pardon the cliché, a hollow version of other sci-fi horror flicks. If Scary Movie had come out 6 weeks later, they would be spoofing this one, too.

Kevin Bacon stars as Dr. Sebastian Caine, an E-Vil genius, who, on the brink of his great discovery, proves that success can, indeed, spoil a man. The discovery? How to make living creatures invisible, and then, the more difficult part (or so they say); how to make them visible again. As the song “The Monster Mash” goes, he was working in his lab, late one night and what should he discover? The answer!

After making a gorilla reappear, it is time for human testing. And that, as they say, is: when something went t e r—i—b l y wrong.

It seems that the 1 or 2% difference in DNA of a gorilla and a man, makes a big difference in the “bring back” part of the experiment, so Bacon is stuck in Claude Raines-ville.

What they do know is this: when animals are invisible, something has happened to their psyche, and this little plot complication allows us to “see” Bacon go mad. And thus the plot thickens. In this predictable movie we get to see Bacon sneak into the pretty girl’s apartment to check her out naked. In this case the pretty girl is played by Rhona Mitka, a good choice, especially if you caught her on Party Of Five. This lame exercise makes me wonder if they shot the girl’s locker room scene and just decided not to use it.

The horror movie staple:

If you leave the pack of friends, you’re the next one to get offed.
The bad guy gets it in the end, but not before we think he’s dead and then get to see him come back to life one more time. Jeez, how many times do we have to see this stupid plot twist?
If you were cracked over the head by a crow bar AFTER being turned into a human match stick by a torch, then were in a room that suffered an explosion filled with a Sulfur Dioxide cloud (very bad on the lungs), how would you manage to pull yourself up several stories of an elevator shaft to attack your former girlfriend? Puh-leeeeeez!
Let me give you a better ending: Bacon kills all his former colleagues, or at least most of them, and then vanishes into society, leaving us all with the terrible feeling that you never know whether that breeze past your neck is the ceiling fan, or Kevin Bacon checking out your ass.

My recommendation is to watch the “Making of Hollow Man” on one of your cable channels. It will show you the best story, without having to sit through a movie that is as see-through as the main character. Sorry for the bad pun, but such a cliché of a movie barely derserves so good a review.

Hank Yuloff is an entertainment industry entrepreneur living in Hollywood. Hank sez: “My casting couch is always available.”.

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