“Hollow Man” is by director Paul Verhoeven (“RoboCop”, “Starship Troopers”), who is no stranger to the sci-fi genre and doesn’t make his films take themselves too seriously but “Hollow Man” is definitely an exception.

In “Hollow Man”, a brilliant scientist named Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon “Tremors”, “The River Wild”) finds a way to make animals invisible and then restore their opaqueness; now he wants to try it on himself. He succeeds at making himself invisible but a problem occurs when trying to turn him back and Caine becomes an insane killer, forcing the team he works with to fight for their lives as they try and escape an underground lab. Like “Anaconda” it’s stupid but doesn’t realise it.

Kevin Bacon provides some humour but the problem is that the script doesn’t help him in anyway. At the start of the film, the character is promising but as it continues, he becomes more a more like a slasher villain. The visual effects for the invisible man are pretty good as you get to partially see him when he makes contact with water and other such things. The other scientists are quite boring, especially Elisabeth Shue (“The Karate Kid”), who gets way more screen-time than she really should.

“Hollow Man” is in no way an original movie, it’s another one where scientists screw up and then spend the rest of the film paying for their mistakes and the idea of an invisible person certainly isn’t original and this movie doesn’t really do anything new with the concept. The special effects are good, there are some good moments near the beginning and there is some tension near the end but aside from that the movie is disappointing. “Hollow Man” should be another clever sci-fi from a competent director but instead it joins the ranks with many other average-at-best movies of its premise (“Deep Blue Sea” is one that comes to mind).