That's right, this movie promises us Sebastian Shaw versus Thanos. And delivers!
...wait, does anyone actually remember that First Class happened? Never mind.
Hollow Man is a film from the year 2000, brought to us by the director of Showgirls and Robocop (and there's your daily dose of utter mindscrew for the day) Paul Verhoeven. It's a (then-)modernized take on H.G. Wells' novel, The Invisible Man. It honestly doesn't go too much more beyond that, but it doesn't really need to. It's still a good story that touches on themes of hubris, as well as corruption by scientific progress left unchecked.
To begin at the begin, we are introduced to Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon), who is developing a serum that - what else? - makes whoever it is administered to invisible. Assisting him are his former girlfriend Linda (Elizabeth Shue) and her new boyfriend Matt (Josh Brolin), along with several lab techs. Caine shows himself to be an incredibly deceitful, egotistical jerk. He lies to his backers and manages to convince the entire team into human testing trials after a gorilla works well.
He undergoes the injection in a scene that really hasn't aged as well as far as CGI goes (and I'll remind you that this film got nominated for an Oscar in Best Visual Effects), and is...as the title says, invisible. Caine seems to have an almost perverse glee at this, pulling pranks on and scaring the living daylights out of the other people in the lab.
Also, trying to force himself on another scientist and then going back to his apartment and raping one of his neighbors.
...oh, yeah. The serum is driving him insane and he soon learns that he can't make himself visible again.
Okay, to be entirely fair, that is putting things a bit out of order and the film - to the best of my recollection - does not actually state that the serum is doing anything to him besides making him invisible. Rather like the original Invisible Man of the Wells novel, he could simply just be letting his ability to be unseen go to his head...at least at first. By the time he locks everyone in the lab, it's pretty clear that he's whistling "They're Coming To Take Me Away".
Kevin Bacon gives an excellent performance as Caine, having the perfect voice for being an invisible killer. Going unseen for much of the film, his growly, raspy voice works well to convey his more creepy scenes as well as the outright terrifying ones, more so as he has sanity slippage. But then again, it's Kevin Bacon. If you're not expecting excellence, then you're sadly mistaken. The rest of the cast doesn't have too much to write home about, good to bad, as far as acting goes.
As much as I was ragging on some of the special effects before, there are many that are generally good and well done. Not all of them hold up to the standards of CGI today, but this was just on the cusp of the new millennium and it is very well implemented. Definitely deserved that Oscar nod, if not a win outright for the work.
Which brings us to our underlying theme in Horror Month 2018 - Man or Monster? In the case of Sebastian Caine...he's definitely a monster. Whether or not he is invisible, the man is incredibly selfish, egotistical, and obsessive. Even without the serum, with just a little bit of jealousy over the pairing of Matt and Linda to push him over the edge, Sebastian took the path down a dark road that proved that he was and always had been one thing: a monster.
...also, locking everyone in the lab, killing off several of them, and making a nitro-glycerin bomb is pretty bad, too.
On the whole Hollow Man is definitely a good popcorn flick if nothing else. It's very much in step with it's inspirational source material, touching on many of the same themes. It's no prize, sure. At best, you could call it above average (elevated by Kevin Bacon's performance). But what it does well, it does very well indeed. Also, again, the special effects still look quite good for its time.
The horrific story of a man who pushed ahead because of his own ego, but Caine was already hollow long before the serum ever entered his body.
Hollow Man is brought to us from Columbia Pictures and is available wherever movies are sold.
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