If only that were true.
Kevin Bacon is Dr. Sebastian Caine, a scientist working for the Defense Department to develop a serum to turn a person invisible. After numerous unsuccessful tests on animals, the team succeeds in bringing on invisible ape back to normal, so the good doctor decides to try the serum on himself, and the movie hits the downward slope.
With Kevin Bacon invisible for the entire movie, it runs into its first big problem. Elisabeth Shue, with the sub-par dialog provided by the scrip, simply cannot carry the movie by herself. And as cool as an invisible man movie could be, the dialog and overacting in the movie grate on you after a time. And as capable an actress as Shue may be - even when paired against a legend like Bacon - when the legend is essentially invisible, the dramatic weight shifts almost entirely to Shue.
What's worse is the last third of the movie deteriorates into one of those cookie-cutter horror/sci-fi flicks where a group of people is picked off one-by-one in a small area. If you've seen any of the Aliens movies, you've seen this done better a hundred times before. With such a weak plot and uninspired acting, the only thing that can save the film from the pits of hell is the excellent job that the effects team did here. In retrospect, however, one imagines that the experience of making this film - back when these effects were closer to newborn than old-age - may have made the actor's jobs more difficult.
The special effects in the movie are absolutely stunning and in many ways were groundbreaking - a statement which was extremely true for the time of the film's construction and mildly true in today's era . Through the use of CGI they did a very convincing job mastering an invisible man flick, and the sequences showing the invisibility process still look worthwhile.
The new material isn't so new, but it integrates a slightly more sexual element into the film through a highlighted rape sequence - which, thankfully, seems more like an extension of the story than a cheap bit of sleaze. There are a few more scenes of violence and chatter which generally don't amount to much and may have been seen on previous releases.
A good-looking bad movie with nothing new to say. Stay away.
Score: 5 out of 10
Video and Presentation
Hollow Man has always looked great, scoring perfect ten's in our previous DVD reviews. Little has changed. Certainly, in the HD era, we now have an image quality against which to compare this, but for a basic, standard-def transfer, this image looks very good. Technology has made some foreword steps in the years since the last DVD release and while other DVDs look just as good, there's nothing to be taken away from the quality here.
Score: 9 out of 10
Languages and Audio
For a movie about an invisible man, the audio has to do its job. And it does. A sharp Dolby Digital 5.1 mix that lets you know where the bad-guy lurks through subtle, well-engineered audio cues in full surround. But lacking any powerful score, it's not yet perfect.
Score: 9 out of 10
Extras and Packaging
Everything old is old again. A short HBO featurette and fifteen short-and-insubstantial behind-the-scenes vignettes are back from previous releases where they added very little to the overall quality, anyway. Boasting a new picture-in-picture mode which shows the VFX shot against the final footage, this disc feels…well…hollow.
Score: 5 out of 10
The Bottom Line
Please disappear. And don't come back.