Rish Outfield's reviews
There are usually a couple of movies every year that focus much heavier on special effects than on story. Hollow Man is no exception. But the fascinating disappearing and reappearing effects are incredible enough that it's still worth seeing.
Now, going into it, I knew this was a mad scientist story and that Elizabeth Shue had top billing (?), so I expected Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon) to be a really despicable character. But you know what, I liked him from the beginning, and never stopped. I don't know if that makes me a perverse person or if I was the only one, but I found him to be the one I empathized with, the one I wanted to win. I'm not saying that he was more sympathetic than the others, in fact, I found all of the characters except the fat guy different levels of unlikable. It made me think, if I were invisible, and as smart as Caine, wouldn't I do the same sort of things he did? Am I any less evil (or have less potential for evil) than him?
Director Paul Verhoeven is renowned for the extraordinary violence in his films (Robocop and Starship Troopers come to mind), but this time around, he seems much more restrained. Test audiences, however, did see at least one scene that was cut out of the released version.
There were a couple of lapses in logic, but the filmmakers probably figured no one would notice. Usually, that would piss me off, but in this case, for some reason, it doesn't.
Note: The first movie I ever snuck into was 1985's The Hitcher. I carried on this tradition with Hollow Man.

The tyranist's thoughts
I'm a pretty big fan of Paul Verhoeven simply because I like to see the directions that he pushes American cinema with his Dutch sensibilities. I've been anticipating that Hollow Man would redefine what has been done with the invisible man theme and take us to places that haven't been explored before.
Well, at least the effects were pretty cool.
So Sebastian Caine is leading up a government research project that is focused on making a man invisible. They are succeeding admirably on their animal subjects when the good doctor decides that it's time for a human test subject. Naturally, his ego will only allow him to volunteer himself. He's rendered invisible and starts to go a little nuts. Then he goes a lot nuts and people start to die. Really once the film reaches this point it has just as much in common with Deep Blue Sea as it does with The Invisible Man.
The cast was fine as was the script and the direction. The effects were really good even though they didn't seem to be quite as on the edge as I expected them to look. Perhaps that indicates how well they were done in that they didn't draw so much attention to themselves that I wasn't watching the rest of the movie. Really the movie was fine. It was a solid horror movie.
The problem is that I expected something exceptional. I expected to see things that I've never seen and events that push the limits of our traditional invisible man thinking. There really wasn't anything challenging that way. As the movie wound on, it became more obvious that I was watching just another horror movie and that disappointed me in a lot of important ways.
Don't skip it because I found it disappointing, though. Really it was a very solid horror movie that can be enjoyed by all horror fans, just don't expect it to redefine what we already know.