Wow. Both bad and dated. A winning combination. First thing’s first, did you know you can get from John Wilkes Booth to Kevin Bacon in five degrees of Kevin Bacon? Yes, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 was a stage actor (cinema didn’t yet exist), but such makes the chain no less impressive:
1. John Wilkes Booth appeared in an 1863 stage production of MacBeth with Louisa Lane Drew.
2. Louisa Lane Drew appeared in an 1896 stage production of The Rivals with her grandson Lionel Barrymore.
3. Lionel Barrymore appeared in It’s A Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart in 1946.
4. Jimmy Stewart was in 1977′s Airport ’77 with Jack Lemmon.
5. Jack Lemmon was in JFK in 1991 with Kevin Bacon.
I don’t know who did the original research on this Bacon number, but I’d like to buy dinner for that person.
I’m stalling because Hollow Man is a terrible film and I really don’t want to think about it. It would have been bad in 2000; it’s worse now. These things are true despite the polish; you can see how much production spent on film quality to enhance the video effects. Of course, now it comes off as high grade soap opera stock, but at the time, I’m sure it brought all the invisible boys to the yard.
Several other things are noticeable at the outset of the film. This appears to be a picture in which world-class researchers are young, white, and hot – just like in real life. This is a picture in which a computer with y2k software can instantly tell if your groundbreaking revolutionary formula is stable or not … with big helpful graphics like “STABLE” –just like in real life. And Kevin Bacon is a big prick – just like in real life.
To tell the truth, I have absolutely no idea what Bacon is like in real life; based on that Super Bowl commercial, he has a keen sense of humor about Bacon numbers, but I have no evidence on his true personality one way or another. What I do know is that Doctor Sebastian Caine (Bacon) is a piece of shit human being. Arrogant, libidinous, condescending…he’s the whole package. He has no issue with tooting his own horn, waking up his “friends” to toot his own horn, voyeuring the neighbor across the way, or just plain embarrassing his colleagues. I know we’re supposed to derive that Caine is the villain (as if you couldn’t tell from the name), yet Hollow Man has set up a situation where the guy in charge is the one we’re least comfortable with presenting the Earth-shattering, groundbreaking science. This is a problem.
And what is the science? Invisibility. The movie tells us that invisibility is easy; it’s bringing the subject back from invisibility that’s the hard part. Oh, is it? Well, by all means then, please indulge in the same special effects Disney used in the 1970s to demonstrate an invisible subject. In a nutshell, the film has given invisibility powers to an asshole. Luckily for us, this is relatively small-time assholery. While a real-life Invisible Man would have the ability to change governments, this one uses it for sexual misconduct.
Oh yeah, try not to throw up when two bros confide over abuse of invisibility… “So, how was the rape?” “All right!” You know, this conversation wasn’t cool in 2000 when the film was made. Now? Well, some of us have no problem with the PC era if it can curtail incidents and communication of this nature. I’d talk here about how I don’t think the film did an ounce research into the mechanics or philosophy of invisibility, but all that is fairly insignificant when you see a film indulge in rape culture.
So I missed Hollow Man the first time around … and the second, and the third …and I felt a little responsible for not helping out the career of Elisabeth Shue. Well, now I have seen it, and I think less of everybody who was in it. Twenty years after the fact, the special effects look horribly dated, but admittedly cool – not unlike, say, claymation – gimme a sword-fighting skeleton over his skin-challenged CGI representation any day of the week. But that’s about the nicest thing I can say of this picture. Hollow Man was directed by Paul Verhoeven who is not shy in his use of the R rating. I’m sure the idea here was to combine the sexuality of Basic Instinct with the thrills of Total Recall. The combination, however, makes for an ugly, misogynistic, deliberately graphic, and painful film.
“She’ll over turn the party of labour”
“He’d become a human light saber!”
Hey, how would you express
Invisibility prowess?
“I’d use it to spy on the neighbor!”
Rated R, 115 Minutes
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Writer: Andrew W. Marlowe
Genre: Oh goody, more “little Kevin Bacon”
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: I dunno, mad scientists, maybe?
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: People who didn’t get around to hating it the first time
