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Weekend Movie Review

by Maarten Goldstein, Aug 05, 2000 12:07pm PDT

Finally an opportunity for me to do a weekend movie review. We (a big QuakeCon group) went out to see Hollow Man last night. It started out pretty cool and creepy, but turned pretty corny towards the end. The special effects were pretty damn good but it didn't make the movie a whole lot better. And seeing Kevin Bacon's package was just unnecessary, even though it was infra-red. In the end, I'd give it like a 6 out of 10.


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  • #43
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    By: einexile x
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    The Hollow Man...ugh. This was not a Paul Verhoeven movie. Even Showgirls was more playful and fun, and yes I do remember the dumb rape scene.

    - no spoilers here -

    The movie took itself way too seriously, and piled on so much phony science that any believability was ruined. If you're going to bullshit, do it quickly and without lame explanations, e.g. Face/Off, The Matrix, any James Cameron movie.

    Elizabeth Shue was shockingly bad. Bacon was pretty much the movie's only saving grace, and I dislike him to begin with. The rest of the cast did a par job at playing the roles of stereotypes, except for Shue's boyfriend who was this weird soap-star type, not the kind of person I would expect to see in a genre thing outside of Babylon 5.

    Effects were interesting, but they did what I had feared they would do. Same devices over and over. Watch the flesh turn to air, ooh, we can see his bones again, here comes the flesh again, there it goes, etc. We had to watch this too many times. This was worse with the invisibility stuff. Instead of anything actually scary, we spent most of the movie watching Bacon do the Predator thing in fog, water, blood, flame, fire sprinkler, bedding, etc.

    Well, not most of the movie, which had one of the longest setups I've ever seen. This is effective if your characters are interesting, but only Shue's had any personality or importance and she was very, very dull. So was Bacon, actually, or I'd have rooted for him. However, I'm not about to dissect someone's acting style, but Shue was awkward through most of the movie and seemed confused when it made no sense for her character to be confused.

    There was one element here that struck me as more awful than even the rest of the otherwise merely boing and silly movie had suggested. Not one, but two deus-ex-machina devices at a crucial moment. That, and Bacon's character takes on superhuman resistance to fire, electrocution, and explosions for no particular reason.

    Oh, and after ten days in that rubber mask, they still hadn't cut out holes for his nostrils and ears. What the fuck is up with that?

    I'm really not one to criticize the Hollywood genre tradition, but this is the kind of movie that gives Hollywood a bad name. It abuses the audience with its laziness, with its noodling and dabbling, and with its negligence in including a shred of interesting conflict or even a token gesture at plot twists or suspense. There are not more than twenty or thirty worthless movies, but this is probably one of them.

    einexile
    Aug 06, 2000 2:26am PDT