Next to the corrosive social commentary of Showgirls and Starship Troopers or even the satirical undertones of Total Recall and Basic Instinct, Hollow Man doesn’t look like much more than a straight-ahead SF action thriller, a genre exercise derived from an original script that’s delivered with exquisite punch and polish. (If you don’t want to know what some of the more predictable punches are, check out now.) It even has a mad scientist whose lab explodes at the end—as venerable a horror staple as one can imagine. And, as I’ve already noted, it has a prelude to sexual ravishment that turns out to be a dream—a cliche at least since Brian De Palma started using it repeatedly in the mid-70s. There’s a passing suggestion that the Pentagon might commit more mischief with invisibility than the selfish hero, but that’s about the sum of Verhoeven’s overt social commentary, apart from what he has to say implicitly about movie spectators.

Moreover, if you expect this movie to have anything to do with T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” the only corroboration you’re likely to find is indirect. Yet this movie’s eroticism as well as its violence, combined with the hyperrealism of its overall look—including its brilliant special effects, which specialize in making bodies materialize from the inside out, with guts and veins sprouting and spreading like gardens—make it as much a Verhoeven production as any of its predecessors. It too makes ethical and ideological observations, in this case mainly about the implications of being invisible—in particular the significance of being able to watch someone without being watched back, a capacity available to anyone who watches a movie. And watching movies, as I suggested in my review of Total Recall ten years ago, is what Verhoeven’s movies are ultimately about.

 

Excerpt from Jonathan Rosenbaum's review at the Chicago Reader located HERE