Apollo Goes Hollow: Hollow Man Tedious, Silly

Hollow Two Hours: Entertainingly bad Hollow Man is worth the three bucks at the Apollo. (photo courtesy Hollowman.com)

Coming to the Apollo this week on the recent wave of summer box office leftovers is Hollow Man, director Paul Verhoeven's attempt to equate invisibility with unbridled male lust. Having made several apes invisible, Dr. Sebastian Cain (Kevin Bacon) declares himself the first human candidate for "quantum phase reversion" or "invisibility," not realizing the moral depravity this condition encourages. Unseen by his colleagues, Cain is free to fondle his lab assistants' breasts, strangle small dogs and speak with an annoyingly raspy voice.

Since the early 80's, Verhoeven (Robocop, Total Recall) has created characters transformed by technology. Robocop, once a law- abiding policeofficer, spent his cyborg afterlife shredding criminals to pieces.

In Hollow Man, technology turns charming, well adjusted Dr. Cain into a slobbering pervert with an indefatigable erection, one he maintains throughout the duration of the film. Cain finds himself sneaking into women's bathrooms, watching his neighbors undress, and miserably trying to win back his ex-girlfriend (Elizabeth Shue).

When he's not unbuttoning women's blouses, Cain is busy stalling the Pentagon, which threatens to take over his project and assemble an army of transparent soldiers. Meanwhile, Cain's colleagues search for a serum that can restore his visible existence and, with it, his good manners.

Unfortunately, the fun of not having to see Kevin Bacon fades after the first forty-five minutes, and the film fast becomes a sad, tedious fistfight between B-grade actors and Bacon's disembodied voice.

Verhoeven's penchant for excessive violence strains the plot's credibility as Cain survives immolation, a crow bar to the head and a dive down an elevator shaft. Though never explained in all the film's dazzling scientific terminology, invisibility seems to grant Cain superhuman resilience.

For those enchanted by special effects, Hollow Man offers its obligatory bag of tricks. In Cain's laboratory, turning invisible is a progressive process, allowing us to view a subject's circulatory system and skeleton before it vanishes completely. In some scenes, the invisible Cain wears a mask with eerily vacuous eye and mouth holes, thus partly justifying the film's silly title.

To be appreciated, Hollow Man, like many movies shown at the Apollo, must be viewed as an accidental comedy. If you can laugh at a white coated lab team swinging their fists at nothing, or at Elizabeth Shue, armed with a blowtorch, screaming, "You think you're God! I'll show you God!," or simply at the thought of Kevin Bacon in his trailer while all this is happening, Hollow Man is worth your three dollars.