T. Stearnes is back...
and he's mad somebody's been ripping off his poems for bad horror movies
Genre: Is Crap a Genre? If not, monster movie.
Writer: Former Nichols Fellow Andrew W. Marloe (who don't let that achievement fool you, is the hack responsible for End of Days and Air Force One) and Gary Scott Thompson (who brought you such films as K-911, TimeCop 2, and Knight Rider). Suffice it to say, high art was probably not first on the table when these guys sat down to work on Hollow Man.
About: The film tanked. The only positive review on record is by the fictional David Manning, who Sony basically created to give the film good publicity. It did, somehow magically, span a sequel, which I can assure you I will never watch. This sequel is probably due to the fact taht the film's worldwide gross was $191,200,000 and production budget was $90,000,000 so it appears to have made money.
Premise: A crazy ass scientist makes himself invisible. And then he goes ape wild!
I thought one time about making a film about Jesus Christ living past the execution and meandering through all sorts of historical events. But then I dropped it because while the idea was cool, it wouldn't really make for a great execution. Hollow Man takes this cool idea, hard to execute theme and blows it up a thousand times. I can just picture the pitch session:
PRODUCER: So do you have any ideas?
GST: "Uh...A guy who's invisible"
PRODUCER: "I love it! Here's a million dollars".
Seriously, this film has one idea. By the time you reach the 30 page mark, it's about as spent as my grandpa after forty five seconds of dry humping. A guy becomes invisible. Now there's a few ways you could go with that: a really cheesy porno where the guy watches women undress, a spy movie where the guy becomes a top government agent, or they could've even made Sebastian spy increasingly more and more on his girlfriend and his best friend. Instead, what this script does is spend 50 pages rambling on about how wonderful this guy is....and then has him go crazy and turns it into a monster movie ending where it doesn't appear that the survivors will live. You could squeeze all these ideas into about 14 minutes, but then you wouldn't have a movie.
The other thing that isn't squeeze into the movie is character development. Basically the guy who becomes hollow's girlfriend is secretly screwing his best friend. This was introduced in a way where I completely hated the girl, and when it came time to side with her in the monster movie ending I despised her and kind of wished the Hollow Man did go see her. She and this guy's best friend have sex about 90 percent of the time they're mentioned. Furthermore, not only do none of these characters have emotional archs (unless going stiry crazy is a character development), they're supposed to be scientists but talk and act in a yuppie hipster sort of way I don't think any real scientist (particularly ones who are working on government projects to make people hollow) talk.
But, credit is earned where credit is due. The dialogue isn't terrible, and the pacing is worth studying. But really folks, that's it. This film sucks. You can tell competent writers wrote it, which prevents it from completely sucking, but it's abysmal. I'm glad I only saw about five minutes of this film and then walked out of the room.
Scooby Doo (Complete Crap)
[ X ] - Atilla (Poor, Few Redeeming Qualities)
Wedding Crashers (Mediocre)
Hot Rod (Good)
Definitely Maybe (Pretty Darn Good)
Isla Prospects: I am thankful Isla will never have to appear in this film. It is unfortunate that Elizabeth Shue was in it. Poor Elizabeth Shue.
What I Learned: High Concept is awesome for about the first 10 pages, but if you don't have character archs or an interesting take on the idea it's all downhill from there. This script was over by the time you'd reach the opening titles.
No comments:
Post a Comment