Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
This first of today’s misbegotten, pointless sequels sees the government continuing on with Kevin Bacon’s work creating invisibility serums, creating a small force of invisible operatives of which Christian Slater’s Michael Griffin is one, who has now succumbed to much the same madness as Sebastian Caine and has gone rogue.
While the military and police are trying to capture him, their only lead is that he’s on the trail of Laura Regan’s Dr. Maggie Dalton, who’s supposed to have created a “buffer” that will counteract the radiation damage that these invisible folks will otherwise ultimately die of, and so begins a tepid game of cat and mouse through Seattle, with Maggie having to trust Peter Facinelli’s Detective Frank Turner, as seemingly the only person without an ulterior motive in all of this.
While it’s not an awful film, and frankly in terms of characterisation and motivation you could perhaps argue it hangs together more coherently as a film than the original did, there’s not a great deal of joy to extract from Hollow Man 2. In particular the greatly reduced budget makes for greatly reduced special effects, and seeing as that was perhaps the only redeeming feature of the original, this does render the sequel somewhat pointless.
Far from the worst film you’ll ever see, but it’s not particularly interesting and can be easily ignored, as indeed most of the world has done.