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Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, who left the canals for California many years ago, is the kind of major player who has the creative freedom (because of his juggernaut commercial success) to make any film he wants. Most folk in the cinemagoing universe have probably seen "RoboCop", "Total Recall", and "Basic Instinct", and part of Verhoeven's appeal is that - in the midst of the mainstream - he keeps supplying us with moments of oddity, or at least moments to remember. Each of his films (including "Soldier of Orange", one of Holland's best ever pictures) has at least one striking image, and "Basic Instinct" famously delivered Sharon Stone's uncrossed legs.
In "Hollow Man" we are soon struck by the bloody disintegration of a mouse, and this is only the first of quite a few unsettling, semi-unpleasant images, like Kevin Bacon losing his skin, his bones and finally his entire self in an experiment of his own making. He is Sebastian Caine, a super-scientist, arrogant maverick and egotist from the first division ("Da Vinci never slept", he quips) who thinks nothing of lying to the Pentagon, whose members agree to support his experiments with invisibility (and in Caine's case, he believes, invincibility). Caine succeeds with animals, and Isabel the gorilla (in one of Verhoeven's knockout visual triumphs) is rendered both invisible and visible again. Ordered not to tinker with humans, Caine naturally disobeys and, fancying the power of being invisible, makes himself a guinea-pig. His first step towards the advance of mankind is to undo his colleague's cardigan and fondle her.
"Hollow Man" is a film of two parts, with part two belonging to another, less original film. When it is a character study of Caine, and is very much anchored in his psyche, it has bags of dramatic force; when it is reduced to a race-against-time thriller (colleagues struggling to stop Caine becoming a mass murderer), it becomes the silliest kind of cartoon, with one of the scientists, his stomach already sliced in half, finding the energy to zip up a steel cable to prevent Elisabeth Shue from being squashed between a lift and a hard place. Hokey lines abound. Psychology 3, action 0.
