Hollow Man
Was Paul Verhoeven the most underrated director of the 1990s, or the most overrated?
This was what went through my head as I watched a see-through Kevin Bacon twist a supermodel’s titties with his invisible fingers in Verhoeven’s 2000 sci-fi thriller, Hollow Man. The movie is the last film Verhoeven directed in America, capping off a strange, hilarious, outrageous decade-long stay in Hollywood. In just over 10 years, Verhoeven made a series of perverse sci-fi gorefests and softcore erotic thrillers that bookended the 1990s in a clasp of bare chests and mutilated corpses including RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and Starship Troopers: all films of almost poronographic excess.
Hollow Man is the underwhelming swan song to Verhoeven’s freewheelin’ ’90s. It’s his worst movie, but it’s also his least insane. This makes Verhoeven unique among filmmakers. Often directors do their worst stuff when they venture off the rails (Heaven’s Gate, Southland Tales). Not Verhoeven. He’s so comfortable off the rails I’m not even sure you can call him a train. He’s more like some kind of Dutch, steam-powered off-road transit system. Like the giant spider in Wild Wild West, which is not a Verhoeven movie, though it’s crazy enough to be one.
Your average Verhoeven character might be covered in toxic waste and splattered into a watery mess. He might be stabbed in the crotch by Martian midget prostitutes or have his brains sucked out by trailer-sized insects. She might have champagne pored over her bare chest by Kyle MacLachlan or have all three of her titties felt up by a future California Govenor. Verhoeven is the reason the phrase “hard R” was invented. He never had a bad guy punched when a metal rod could be shoved through his neck. His bad guys seem to call women “bitch” for no reason. My brother and I watched Total Recall a dozen times growing up, almost exclusively on TNT and TBS. When I finally saw the unedited version in college I was shocked at all the wonderful touches of carnage I’d been missing, like the way Quaid (Schwarzenegger) dislodges his backstabbing friends neck and the hollow popping noise that accompanies it.
And yet, there was always just enough craftsmanship present beneath the tacky paint jobs of Verhoeven vehicles to indicate they might be worth keeping in the driveway. Critics and fans bestowed upon his giant bugs, robotic law enforcers and horny sociopaths a redeeming social importance normally witheld from genre fair until a few decades pass. Invasion of the Body Snatchers had to wait half a century before film snobs took notice of its Red Scare themes, but Verhoeven’s films seemed to get revisionist critiques before the ushers had finished sweeping the Goobers from the theater floor. Mostly RoboCop, which eventually got a Criterion DVD release, but also Basic Instinct (which screened at Cannes) and the fascist undertones of Starship Troopers. Even Showgirls became a bonafide cult classic with its own boxed-set DVD.
Against all odds, then, Mr. Verhoeven wound up making just one bad movie in America: Hollow Man. Sebastian Caine (Bacon) is a brilliant, arrogant biologist who defies his government backers and uses himself as a test subject for a serum that turns organisms invisible — or, to use the terminology of the film’s pseudo-science, shifts them “out of quantum sync with the visible universe.” Reluctantly assiting Caine is a team of lab technicians and PhD’s whose importance in the project is directly proportional to their sexiness: Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Shue are his right and left hand men, whereas curly-haired Joey Slotnick spends the movie tucked neatly far behind a bank of computer monitors. He might have just stayed put after Twister.
The centerpiece of Hollow Man is an extended scene where Caine, straped to a hospital bed, shifts the fuck out of quantum sync and vanishes into air, into thin air. Ah! But the hook is that Caine doesn’t simply fade into transparency like Marty McFly at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance; he disappears layer by layer. First skin, then muscles, then veins and organs, you get the idea. It’s like those Bodies exhibits, but without that creepy thought that a Chinese prisoner had to die to make your trip to the South Street Seaport worthwhile.
Seeing Kevin Bacon’s pancreas and central nervous system do make for a cool 5 minutes, not only for the scene’s then-novel use of special effects but for its graphic, mildly disturbing look at human physiology that also marked the coolest parts of RoboCop and Total Recall.
Had Hollow Man stayed on this trajectory it might have been a nice transition for Verhoeven into the realm of CGI (a transition that began with Starship Troopers). But no sooner does invisible Bacon go invisible nuts that the film turns into the same monster-picks-off-team-through-metal-corridors scenario that science-fiction has been retrofitting since 1979, when a fanged xenomorph popped out of John Hurt’s stomach and turned the Nostromo into its own personal Ponderosa Steakhouse.
Given some time, though, I can see Hollow Man carving out a nice little niche for itself as an offbeat special-effects sideshow: in the same Netflix “related movies” column as The Blob or Tron. Computer-generated art, unlike puppetry and latex makeup, don’t age very well — there’s a reason ReBoot hasn’t been immortalized — but let’s hope it does, lest Verhoeven’s flawless resume be cursed with a normal movie. If all goes well, in 20 years Hollow Man could come to be seen as our generation’s Clash of the Titans, just with a lot more exposed titties.
