Hollow Man (2000)

  I think this is the most unlikeable character Kevin Bacon has ever played.  Sci-fi with a sleazy edge seems to be a specialty of director Paul Verhoeven.  If I were scaling his movies, I'd say Total Recall has the most sci-fi, least amount of sleaze and move all the way down to Showgirls, for most sleaze, least sci-fi.  I would put Hollow Man after Starship Troopers and before Basic Instinct.

Scientists working at a top-secret lab somewhere in the middle of Georgetown in Washington, D.C. have created a serum to turn living animals invisible to the naked eye.  Turning them back seems to be the stickier issue.  The head of the project, Dr. Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon), wants to make the leap to human trials over the objections of his colleagues, Dr. Linda McKay (Elizabeth Shue) and Dr. Matt Kensington (Josh Brolin).  He decides to use himself as a guinea pig and becomes completely transparent.  Unfortunately, the prototype re-visible serum doesn't work, and the longer Caine is stuck as the Invisible Man, the more psychotically unstable he becomes.

This was an interesting movie, as far as where we thought science would be in 2000, but it was ultimately soured for me by the lurid glee with which they showed the villain taking advantage of different women.  I'm not going to say there isn't something appealing about the idea of an invisible lover (who also doesn't speak and cleans my apartment on the way out), but this crossed that fantasy line pretty quickly.  Obviously, this was more about voyeurism and power, but as a woman, that kind of adolescent rape fantasy just doesn't do it for me.