Director Paul Verhoeven had quite a run back in the late 80's and early 90's.  Though he had been making films in Europe for years, he really burst onto the scene in 1987 with his first American film, Robocop. A couple of years later he made the successful Total Recall (1990) and then in 1992 he hit it really big with the much talked about (and $100 million+ grossing) thriller, Basic Instinct.  Verhoeven was on a roll but things went down hill. For some reason he selected the critically reviled Showgirls for his next project.  The director decided to stick with the genre that made him famous after that and created the cult favorite Starship Troopers and then Hollow Man in 2000 before taking a six year hiatus.  This final American movie of his has now been released on Blu-ray.  Like most of Verhoeven's films, this one is a bit deeper than your average Hollywood flick, but ultimately the movie moves away from examining how being invisible would affect someone and turns into a typical horror movie.

Dr. Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon) is a military scientist working on invisibility.  It turns out that it's relatively easy to make a creature invisible; it's getting them back that's the problem.  Caine's team, which includes his old lover Linda McKay (Elisabeth Shue), her current boyfriend Matthew Kensington (Josh Brolin), and veterinarian Sarah Kennedy (Kim Dickens), are working night and day on the problem because the brass at the Pentagon are getting a bit impatient.

Eventually Caine does come up with the solution, at least one that works on primates.  Afraid that the military will take his project away before he can win the Noble Prize (does he really think that the military will let him announce what he's done??) Sebastian decides to try the invisibility drug himself.  It works as planned until it's time for him to become visible again.  Things don't go quite as planned and he doesn't reappear as he should.  The longer Sebastian stays transparent, the more paranoid and egotistical he becomes until he finally decides that his teammates are trying to steal his invention and his glory, and that he just can't have.

This is one of those films that are almost really good but fall short of the mark.  The beginning and middle were very good.  The idea of examining how a megalomaniac would react to being invisible has a lot of potential.  The fact that they painted Caine (after going through the process) as becoming a man without a conscience made it all the more interesting.  Unfortunately the last act of the movie turns it into a typical horror film, and not a very good one at that.  The brilliant scientists that are trapped and being stalked by an invisible mad man act like clueless high school students in a B-grade slasher show.  What is the first thing they do when they realize they're in trouble?  They all run to another part of their complex leaving the slow one behind to get killed.  Then they figure it's a good idea to split up to make it easier for the killer to pick them off one-by-one.  These guys are supposed to be smart?  (While I'm thinking about it, why didn't they just unplug the centrifuge at the end?)  Add a scene ripped right out of Alien and a couple of false endings and you've got one clichéd ending that really brings the movie down a lot.

I was also disappointed in the characters.  There really isn't much development over the course of the film.  Yeah, the serum makes Dr. Caine a psycho, but that wasn't too much of a jump in the first place, and they made the point that it was the chemical compound that tipped him over the edge.  If it was just being invisible that did it, that would have made for a more interesting film, assuming they explored why invisibility had that effect on him.

The one thing that does work well is the effects.  There are several amazing scenes where people and animals are becoming either visible or invisible.  First only the skeleton can be seen, then the internal organs, then muscles are added on.  That would be good if the subject was asleep and motionless, but they aren't.  While all this is happening the guinea pig is thrashing around.  It's pretty incredible.  Unfortunately these cool looking scenes don't quite make up for the film's deficiencies.

Note:  This is the director's cut of the movie which adds eight more minutes of footage.  None of the extra and elongated scenes add much to the movie however.  There's a new scene where the vet tells the other team members that she thinks Sebstian felt her up while she was sleeping, the rape scene is longer and more explicit, and this version shows the vet confronting Dr. Caine when she discovers the dog that he killed.  Those were the only changes I could detect. The extended rape scene does paint Caine as an even viler person than in the original version, but not by that much.  All in all, these scenes don't really improve the movie.
 

Video:

The 1.85:1 MPEG-4 AVC encoded image looks very good overall.  The level of detail is excellent, improving on the original SD release from 2000 which was already good.  The colors are bright and really jump off the screen in several scenes.  When they inject the ape with the bright red serum that will return it to visibility, the only part of the primate that can be seen are the chemicals that are flowing through her veins, outlining her cardio-vascular system in vivid, eye-popping red.  Likewise the flame-filled explosions at the end are filled with gorgeous orange hues that are really impressive.  Blacks are solid too.

On the digital side, things look nearly as good.  The 50 GB disc doesn't suffer from blocking or posterization, though there is some jittering of some fine lines in one scene (when Linda looks out of her apartment window and the camera pans over the fire escape.)  Aside from this, the disc looks fine.

Audio:

This movie comes with a PCM 5.1 uncompressed soundtrack as well as a DD 5.1 track.  I screened the film with the PCM track and it sounded very good.  One of my complaints with many movies is that the action scenes go all out with full use of the soundstage but then collapse to basically a stereo mix afterwards.  This film doesn't do that.  Even in the more sedate dialog filled sequences sound effects and background music will be thrown to the rears.  During the action of course the whole soundstage really comes alive and puts the viewer right in the middle of the action.  There was good use made of the .1 channel too, with some scenes really giving the sub a good workout.

Extras:

Are Blu-ray producers trying to make it easy for people to just stick with their SD discs?  Ya gotta wonder sometimes.  One of the easiest things to do would be to port over all of the bonuses from the SD version, right?  I'm not even talking about upgrading them to HD, just a 480p image.  That should be the absolute minimum.  But no, Columbia couldn't do that.  This new disc has great audio and video, but it's missing some fairly significant bonus features.  The commentary track with director Paul Verhoeven, writer Andrew W. Marlowe, and actor Kevin Bacon is missing, as is the isolated music track.  (The text actor bios are also missing but that's not an egregious error.)  What were they thinking???

What do we get?  First off is an HBO-type special, Hollow Man:  Anatomy of a Thriller, which is a pretty useless fluff piece.  Much better are the 15 behind the scenes clips that run a total of about 40 minutes.  These are pretty interesting, showing how different effects were created and comparing some scenes to the original storyboards.  There's also a neat VFX Picture Comparison for three scenes which presents the raw footage with an P-in-P insert with the final product.

Final Thoughts:

This movie is almost really good.  While the idea of an invisible man going crazy isn't new, they approached the concept in a good way and had a lot of potential.  Unfortunately it failed to live up to it and instead devolved into a clichéd thriller in the final third of the film.  The special effects were very impressive however and this Blu-ray disc reproduces them wonderfully.  Though it is a flawed film, it's fun to watch and it looks and sounds very good so I was struggling with whether to rate it 'recommended' or 'rent it'.   The lack of the commentary that is included on the SD version of the film tipped the scales for me though.  Blu-ray adopters shouldn't have to choose between a better picture and better extras.  Make this one a rental.

Note: The images in this review are not from the Blu-ray disc and do not necessarily represent the image quality on the disc.