OxfordPress.com

Grade: C

Verdict: After a suspenseful first half, you may wish it would just disappear.

Details: Starring Kevin Bacon and Elisabeth Shue. Rated R for graphic violence, nudity, profanity. 1 hour, 54 minutes.

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Review: A high-tech fusion of "The Invisible Man" and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," it lets director Paul Verhoeven ("Starship Troopers," "Total Recall") show off some gruesome, state-of-the-art computer effects and exercise his gleeful brand of brutal action. But his filmmaking energy is wasted on a weak script and characters so two-dimensional, they're virtually all transparent.

Kevin Bacon, with his trademark blue-eyed amorality, plays Dr. Sebastian Caine (now there's a movie name). Driven and narcissistic, he's heading a top-secret, Pentagon-funded study in a lab buried deep beneath the streets of D.C. He's aided by Linda (Elisabeth Shue), a former lover, and Matthew (Josh Brolin), who, unknown to the jealous Caine, is Linda's new boy-toy. They seem to be turned on by their mutual blandness.

There are also a handful of lab assistants who might as well have "Third-Act Victim" stamped on their foreheads.

The team's job is to create an invisibility serum. That part's easy: The lab is crammed with cages full of invisible test animals. The trickier job is developing a formula that makes the critters visible again, without killing them in the process.

You know what happens next. Yes, Caine volunteers to be the first human guinea pig. Then, he can't turn visible again. As days pass, the serum starts to give him evil thoughts, and he begins to misuse his invisibility. From practical jokes, he graduates to breaking and entering, rape and murder.

This would be a lot more interesting if Caine started off as someone recognizably human; he's already such a cad when we first meet him, his later bad behavior isn't surprising. This is a guy who calls himself God, after all.

Sneaking up behind his colleagues, playing mind games with them, the see-through Caine says, "You have no idea how much fun this is." No, we don't. The script is too busy hurtling toward its Götterdämmerung finale (flamethrowers, falling elevators, explosions, etc.) to let us get a sense of what invisibility might feel like from the inside.

The only reason to see "Hollow Man" is to check out the computer-generated effects. Yes, you will believe there's an invisible man onscreen. You just won't be very interested in him. The most spectacular sequences are when Caine takes the formula, and gains transparency from the outside-in. It looks as if the skin is melting off his body, revealing the sinews and blood vessels beneath. The effects are fascinating, and pretty gross.

They can keep you paying attention, and so does Verhoeven's steely, relentless pacing. But nothing can save the half-hour finale that turns the unlikely Shue into an action heroine. By then, at a preview screening this week, "Hollow Man" was met by hollow laughter from mocking audience members.

For the record, "End of Days" scribe Andrew W. Marlowe wrote the thing. At one point in the movie, Caine says, "It's amazing what you can do when you don't have to look at yourself in the mirror anymore." Maybe that's how Marlowe managed to write something so trite: He covered up the mirrors in his house until he finished the script. . . .

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service