Disappear!

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

For reasons known only to the kind of people who take the Star Wars missile-defense system seriously, the Pentagon thinks the capacity to make yourself invisible has huge military potential. It is underwriting Dr. Sebastian Caine's expensive experiments in dematerialization.

This is silly. Every schoolboy knows the only worthwhile reason to become invisible is so you can case the girls' locker room undetected. Caine (an utterly charmless Kevin Bacon) does use his power voyeuristically in Hollow Man. But this being an up-to-date--that is to say, thoroughly ugly--movie, he doesn't stop there. He becomes a rapist. And then, of course, a murderer.

Perhaps he is merely acting out the implicit logic of the 1933 film of H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man, of which Paul Verhoeven's new movie is an entirely unacknowledged remake. Both Caine and Claude Rains' Jack Griffin find it easier to attain the ectoplasmic state than to return from it; both become increasingly megalomaniac as a result of the scientific process they embrace. The big difference between the two pictures is attitude. James Whale, who directed the first movie, made a kind of moral comedy of the situation--lots of befuddled English country types doing dialect jokes--but with some nicely put thoughts about messing with nature. Verhoeven simply makes a mess of it.

Too many special effects, many of them stomach churning; too much pornographically arranged death. Early in the picture you wonder why Verhoeven is so obsessively interested in a perfectly ordinary elevator. Later on you see why: it's where the climactic fireball is going to explode, imperiling Elisabeth Shue's and Josh Brolin's hairdos. They deserve better than this. But so do we all.

--By Richard Schickel