If Columbia Pictures own publicity is to be believed, Hollow Man is anything but what it actually is — hollow. Sure, the premise starts out with bite and promise: take a morally questionable character, imbue them with power, take away public accountability, lift social constraints and ask the big ‘what if?’. That invisibility should serve as the catalyst of this proposed descent into the darker urges of humanity invites is supposedly to invite as much comment about society as it does about what individuals might do if they are no longer accountable to their reflection. The lack of the public gaze which ascribes and positions social judgement, and the removal of the personal mirror (our reflection) by which we gauge that judgement, motivates this study in evil. Yet Hollow Man, in framing its content as a stock-standard thriller flick, never really studies its subject very well or even all that intimately, despite a promising setup.

The distributor’s publicity describes Kevin Bacon’s character as ‘magnetic, charismatic and brilliant’, to which it is expected audiences would identify with this role before following him through his darker moments in what has erroneously been described as a ‘modern gothic’. True, Kevin Bacon has done some worthwhile work but portraying a mad scientist who tells bad jokes (just how old is the ‘superman/wonder woman/invisible man’ joke anyway?) is not one of his finest moments. But the obvious signposting of events in a template script (replicated from other slash’n'dash films like Anaconda, Lake Placid, etc), the poor dialogue, the mainstream acting (there is little feel of rawness here, unlike the classic Alien) does little to engage any intellectual sparring beyond surface elaborations — look beneath the plot, the development of the premise, and it really is quite hollow.

By the second half of the film, it had slipped rather comfortably into a kill-by-numbers fare in which the admittedly impressive special effects took centre stage, not pausing long enough to reflect critically on Kevin Bacon’s fall from grace. The effects, though highly medical in nature in some places, are imaginative in their generation. The disappearance and reappearance sequences are detailed in the extreme and capture the visual sense (and perhaps those with a squeamish constitution like my own) with little difficulty. The ‘burn and blood’, the ‘underwater and rain’, and the ‘smoke and fog’ sequences are sure to be award nominations. The medical sequences themselves, such as the dissolution of Kevin Bacon’s character layer by layer, has through the support of the financiers behind Hollow Man contributed to the understanding of human physiology that a lack of government funding otherwise denied the schools of research creating this scene. But, generally, as is the case with modern film-making of this nature, where narrative lacks, the special effects act in surrogate support.

The trick to enjoying this film is to expect little and to ignore completely that it’s a Paul Verhoven film. Hollow Man is overall standard movie-making through a slash and dash template, with a couple of extra disturbing scenes heavily edited from their R-rated context. Because of this, it is admittedly a lighter entry for director Paul Verhoven who is controversially renowned for obscenely violent films like Robocop and Total Recall (the rare R-rated cut though, in a rather confessional tone, it is a surprisingly good sci-fi romp) and over-rated psycho-sexual explorations such as Basic Instinct (a flash in the pan release, famous for one rather crudely cut interrogation scene which inspired a generation of sexed-up cable-tv thrillers) and Showgirls (perhaps one of the lamest attempts in movie history to pass softcore porn off as mainstream cinema). Familiar with these earlier works, I did expect a rather tawdry, violent and exploitative film pushing the limits of acceptability in the name of box-office capital — fortunately, Hollow Man revealed itself to instead be rather formulaic. It should make millions.