"Hollow Man"

Paul Verhoeven churns out a feast of breasts and gore. I haven't had a worse time at the movies this summer.

By Charles Taylor

Aug 4, 2000 | There are two types of Paul Verhoeven movies: the ones that provide a trashy, semi-pornographic good time, like "The Fourth Man," "Basic Instinct" and "Showgirls," and the ones like "Starship Troopers" or "Total Recall" that, as Terrence Rafferty said in his review of the latter, leave you feeling "as if the life had been pounded out of you, and you never want to go to the movies again."

Verhoeven's latest picture, "Hollow Man," doesn't fully reach that point until the last half hour or so (though there's plenty of unpleasantness beforehand), but when it does it reaches it with a vengeance. Here's a statement you won't see quoted in the ads: I haven't had a worse time at the movies this summer.

Like the ability to stop time in Nicholson Baker's novel "The Fermata," invisibility is a natural springboard for a great dirty joke, a chance to indulge the sort of voyeuristic sex fantasies that Verhoeven has never been able to resist. (Let's face it, if most of us could stop time, we'd rob a bank. And if most of us could be invisible, we'd be peepers.) At the beginning of "Hollow Man," when Kevin Bacon's driven scientist gazes hungrily out his apartment window at his pulchritudinous neighbor -- who, of course, obliges by stripping in front of fully lit windows -- Verhoeven is winking at the audience like a carny barker providing a tease and promising to deliver the full goods later on. He does, but repellently. There's nothing wrong with a filmmaker who's an honest whore, but Verhoeven's ministrations have become cruder and more mechanical with each picture. In his earlier films, you could feel his naughty-boy thrill at shocking the audience. Now he shows the audience a practiced old tart's contempt for those who avail themselves of his services.

The movie proceeds by the hoariest sci-fi clichis. The Pentagon bigwigs funding Bacon's invisibility project demand results, so, without their knowledge, he volunteers to be its next subject, announcing to his co-workers, "You don't make history by following the rules. You make history by seizing the moment." I giggled at that, but I don't think Verhoeven intends it to be funny. The exposition scenes are numbingly square because Verhoeven can't wait to get to the sex and gore shock scenes.

The descendants of Dr. Frankenstein who people sci-fi and horror films have traditionally been good men driven mad by their quest for knowledge. Perhaps Verhoeven thinks he's reversing a namby-pamby clichi by making Bacon's Sebastian Caine an unscrupulous bastard from the start. But dramatically it's a miscalculation. There's no suspense in watching a worm become a prick. And there's nothing to care about either. Sebastian delights in tormenting the veterinarian (Kim Dickens) who's been assigned to monitor the animals he experiments on. "Hollow Man" signals its intentions so obviously that the vet and the beasts might as well have red bulls-eyes on their heads. When we find out Bacon's second-in-command (Elisabeth Shue), who's also his ex, is keeping her involvement with another scientist (Josh Brolin) on the project secret, we've got a pretty fair idea they're not safe either.

For someone who's essentially a slick, clever exploitation filmmaker, Verhoeven gets taken awfully seriously. Artforum selected "Starship Troopers" as one of the greatest artistic achievements of the '90s, and the magazine recently conducted a respectful interview with the director. Earlier this week, Salon ran an essay by my colleague Andrew O'Hehir praising Verhoeven's career as a study in "ambivalence." The sex and violence he loads his movies with, Verhoeven is quoted as saying, is essentially no nastier than the secret tastes of a century that showed the Nazis as one extreme of human possibility. You've got to hand it to Verhoeven; as sleazemeister rationales go, that's one of the fanciest.

Next Page: That classic exploitation trick of pretending to condemn the things you use to titillate

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