Hollow Man - Rewind Mini Review ~ LightsRemoteAction

Released 10 years ago today...

Original Release Date: August 4, 2000

"I don't think he's gonna make it"

Ah, Paul Verhoeven, how I miss thee. Nobody approached film making like this man does. From "Robocop" to "Total Recall" to "Starship Troopers", love him or hate him the man has a certain flair for violence and satire. "Hollow Man" is no different although I do believe it is one of his lesser works mainly due to how conventional the movie is. You have a man that is turned ~~invisible~~ "hollow" and then turns psychotic and goes on a murderous rampage. It is your basic thriller setup all glossed up with competent early turn of the century effects.

Kevin Bacon, Josh Brolin, and Elisabeth Shue are part of one of the dumbest science teams you will ever see. They are experimenting on lab animals to learn how to turn an organic creature "hollow". Eventually they want to jump ahead and Kevin Bacon volunteers for the job of guinea pig. Once he has gone "hollow" he slowly devolves from a crackpot scientist to just a crackpot and starts killing members of his science team because...well, just because. The movie is just a lot of very dumb and not a whole lot of fun, seriously, these scientists all must have been dropouts or something because they always make the worst decisions possible. Take the final act for instance, by the fifth time someone mutters the phrase "I will be right back" and someone dies you start to wonder if this was meant as a parody of some sort.

In the end it is a pretty "hollow" movie that doesn't do anything even coming close to original. The final showdown between the science team and the Hollow Man has some cheap thrills and really brutal deaths in classic Verhoeven style though. I suggest if it is on TV or you can stream it at no cost it is worth a watch if you don't want to your brain to work too much. At least Josh Brolin made it out of this movie with a career, Elisabeth Shue is starring in "Piranha" of all things this summer and Kevin Bacon's career has all but disappeared...or should I say turned "hollow"?