Flak Magazine: Review of Hollow Man, 08-09-00

Frank Capra is regarded as one of the chief cinematic biographers of the American spirit — Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Meet John Doe, It’s a Wonderful Life, his Why We Fight documentaries — and much has been made of his Italian origins. As such, his portraits of the United States are considered particularly clear-eyed: praise and damnation from someone who has another home to compare it to. It helps that Capra made his most fervent declarations of America’s freedoms as Mussolini tightened his fist around Italy.

Hollywood’s current big-name non-native filmmakers don’t show as many traces of being moved to commentary by international politics, but they continue to produce some of America’s most fawning, in-love-with-itself movies. Wolfgang Petersen and Roland Emmerich, both German, directed such films as In the Line of Fire, Independence Day and Air Force One before going mano-a-mano this July 4 weekend with The Patriot and The Perfect Storm, both celebrations of Americanness. Czech Milos Forman first looked into our cloudy soul in 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and spent the ‘90s chronicling the lives of two signposts on our cultural barometer with The People vs. Larry Flynt and Man on the Moon.

But it’s the Dutch auteur Paul Verhoeven who really gets America where it lives and breathes (and kills and copulates). With their “don’t lose sight of what makes this country great” tone, Capra and Forman are like grandfathers, but Verhoeven is the crazy uncle who doesn’t get invited over anymore. His whole American oeuvre, from Robocop to Total Recall to Basic Instinct to Showgirls to Starship Troopers, has been considered disreputable at best, but Robocop’s Dick Jones (Ronny Cox) is a Mr. Potter for the late ‘80s, and that movie’s scathing dismissal of the privatization of vital government functions remains some of sci-fi’s finest and funniest satire. The yea-rah fascism of Starship Troopers may not have coalesced into one great punchline (well, Gestapo Doogie, I guess), but the fact that many people considered it a straight alien flick is a revelation of national character straight out of Andy Kaufman.

What this all goes to say is that Hollow Man is a major disappointment because — unlike most Verhoeven — it’s got no teeth. Its H.G. Wells-cum-Nicholas Baker treatment — superscientist Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon) perfects an invisibility serum, uses it on himself and proceeds to rape and murder — is very Verhoeven, and plausible in the sense that you believe a healthy chunk of homegrown alpha males would use invisibility as license for sexual misbehavior. But Caine is so flipped out from frame one (i.e., when he’s visible) that no one feels indicted by his invisibility-induced psychosis; even the most abhorrent numbskull would be validated by how bad he is. Norman Bates warned that we all go a little mad sometimes, but he was talking about how people fluctuate from normal to a little mad. Since “a little mad” is Caine’s baseline and he keeps spiking at “really nuts,” the whole “misunderstood” part of “misunderstood monster” is gone and we have the conscienceless horror of the monsters from Jaws or Alien, but in human form. That might me some kind of coup for Verhoeven if we hadn’t all already been desensitized to senseless killing, but Hollow Man’s progressive, pick-the-sucker-out-of-the-crowd murders are just boring.

The movie could even be an interesting character study about how Caine loses it when he discovers that his ex-flame coworker Linda (Elisabeth Shue) had left his genius self for his less brilliant, less homicidal lab partner (Josh Brolin), except there’s no chemistry in their love triangle and you never feel that Linda’s torn between her guys. Heck, it could even take a few swings at the Pentagon for letting a wacko like Caine run his own ship, as tired as those jibes might be. But Hollow Man’s got nothing except slicked-up sci-fi action bluster.

Which is a specialty of Verhoeven’s, and so it’s good bluster, and it has a sense of humor (early on, we watch the invisible man fondle a breast that changes shape seemingly of its own accord, like a 14-year-old with Kai’s Power Tools). And maybe we should praise Verhoeven for taking a genre exercise and not following the genre to its formula-prescribed end (the mad scientist realizing what he’s done and sacrificing himself to stop his transgressive evil from being loosed upon the world, for instance). But “what if Jason Vorhees were invisible?” is a premise that should have never left a pitch meeting, and the best special effects in the world can’t make it work.

That’s unfortunate, because the movie has the best special effects in the world, or at least the summer, as well as the season’s most challenging major director. And as we hope for better output next time from underrated players like Verhoeven and Bacon, it’s probably best to pretend that Hollow Man was left unseen.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)