Kevin Bacon: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked
3. Sebastian Caine - Hollow Man
Director Paul Verhoeven is usually quite good at taking trashy subjects and making them into intelligent, bloody thrillers (RoboCop, Total Recall). His mojo failed him on his last Hollywood film Hollow Man, about a rock star scientist (played by Bacon) who turns himself invisible, then slowly starts to go crazy when he cant turn back. Rape, murder and gratuitous scenes of a naked Kevin Bacon follows. The movie has all the sex and death that can be found in Verhoevens other work, but the brain isnt there. Bacons performance is an uneasy mix of camp and menace, where the audience can never be sure if hes trying to be funny or scary from scene to scene. His performance is erased quite literally by the special effects, which robs it of any nuance he might have brought to it otherwise. There was a sequel a few years later with Christian Slater taking over invisible man duties; it must have been a meta exercise, as it completely disappeared without trace.
