Hollow Man

What you see is what you get in the aptly titled Hollow Man, Paul Verhoeven's version of The Invisible Man that owes little to H.G. Wells and less to T.S. Eliot. Kevin Bacon brings impish evil to the otherwise empty role of Dr. Sebastian Caine, an overreaching, workaholic scientist who, like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, decides to test his invisibility serum on himself before he's quite worked all the kinks out. He disappears just fine, but the serum for bringing him back (blue for invisible; orange for visible -- so much for scientific explanations) doesn't work the way it did on Isabelle the gorilla.

So, never a nice guy, Caine spends his time moping around the lab and waiting for his oddball research team to solve the problem while he plays nasty pranks like fondling the breasts of sleeping women and beating the lab's invisible dog to death. Soon he's running amok, knocking off his colleagues one by one in a subdued imitation of the thrills in Alien. Verhoeven has the knack for mixing generic sci-fi with brilliant black comedy and trenchant satire, as in Robo-Cop and the undervalued Starship Troopers, and here he touches on such metaphoric implications of invisibility as the release of inhibitions, the paradox of power and powerlessness, and society's assault on privacy. Ultimately, though, the driving passions are love woes worthy of Jerry Springer. The special effects are fascinating -- at times it's like a living example of the Museum of Science's old "Visible Woman" exhibit -- but Hollow Man's appeal is all on the surface.

-- Peter Keough