Hollow Man is a 2000 science-fiction horror film directed by Paul Verhoeven, the man behind RoboCop, Total Recall, and Basic Instinct, and that pedigree explains a great deal about the film you actually get. It stars Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Caine, an arrogant scientist who volunteers to test an experimental invisibility serum on himself, cannot be turned back, and gradually descends into violence and madness. Elisabeth Shue and Josh Brolin co-star. I came away from it genuinely conflicted, because the film kept pulling me in opposite directions, and the single clearest lesson I took from it is that if any human being is ever granted invisibility, they will use it to do something deeply weird.

Let me start with the biggest point in its favour: Kevin Bacon. He is excellent here, and specifically he nails an effortless, insufferable cockiness that carries the whole film. The walk, the voice, the general air of a man utterly convinced he's smarter and better than everyone around him, it's all pitched perfectly, and it never once feels like effort. Even critics who disliked the film tended to single Bacon out, and it's easy to see why he was cast for being both charming and diabolical.

On the other side of the ledger, I was not prepared for quite how much of Kevin Bacon this film would show me. Between the transformation sequences and the basic logistics of an invisible man not wearing clothes, there's a lot of him on display. The effects team even constructed a complete, anatomically accurate 3D digital model of his entire body, down to the capillaries, which was later donated to scientific research. So a fully detailed virtual Kevin Bacon exists in a lab somewhere, which is a sentence I did not expect to write today.

The visual effects themselves are a genuine highlight, at least in part. Roughly half of the film's $95 million budget went into them, and the work was strong enough to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects, losing to Gladiator. The layer-by-layer transformation sequences, in particular, still look impressive. That said, for every effect that dazzles, there's another that has aged into unintentional comedy. It's inconsistent in a way that keeps you on your toes.

Now, two things I have to flag. The first is the notorious scene in which the invisible Sebastian beats a lab dog to death against a wall, which is genuinely unpleasant to watch. In a fit of righteous fury, I was ready to report a twenty-six-year-old film to the authorities, only to discover that the ASPCA had already investigated this exact scene when the film was made. Verhoeven showed them raw footage of the real dog being handed off and swapped for a dummy, and the animal was completely unharmed. So the matter was resolved decades ago, and the dog is fine.