It is sad when a movie starts out stupid.  Then, if the folks making the movie care, they have to work doubly hard to get said movie on track.  Let us take the opening of the little DTV gem known as Hollow Man 2.  A drunk scientist is at a party.  He starts getting tossed around by some unseen force, while party goers assume he’s just had one too many.  The unseen force tosses him into a bathroom.  Turns out the unseen force is Michael Griffin, an invisible man looking for something called the ‘buffer’.  After beating the doctor within an inch of his life, the good doctor finally drops the info that Griffin needs.  Griffin warns the doctor not to tell anybody you’ve seen me, and he’s adamant about it.  A door opens and closes, the doctor reaches for his cell phone and starts calling.  Uh, doc… Dude is INVISIBLE!!!  You can’t see him… he might still be there… Just a thought, doc.  Guess what?  Invisible dude is still there, he gets totally pissed off and he slashes the doctor’s throat with his cell phone.

Note that I said ‘if they care’.  The creators of Hollow Man 2, a sequel to a film that really wasn’t begging for a sequel, could give less than a damn as the movie gets dumber and dumber as time goes on.  By now we’ve met Detective Frank Turner who is the requisite ‘cop who doesn’t play by the rules’.  Complete with razor stubble too, so we know he’s outta control.  His honest rule playing partner, completely disposable partner Lisa Martinez who exist, as anyone who’s ever seen any of these kinds of movies knows, only to die so our ottta control cop can get to the ‘truth’.  We also meet the impossibly beautiful narrow-waisted, highly educated molecular bio geneticist Maggie Dalton, who has a ‘secret’.  The detectives are charged by the evil government

cover up operatives to ‘guard’ Doctor Dalton from what, they don’t exactly know.  It would have been nice to tell the cops that dude is INVISIBLE!  That way, when invisible dude is walking around the house sneaking up behind folks and bludgeoning them with lamps, at least the cops could be expecting it!  They would have told them, but couldn’t because of the ‘Patriot Act’.  That's right, blame The Patriot Act.

This movie drags out every worn tired and used cliché that you’ve ever been exposed to.  I’m told that thousands upon thousands of people descend on Hollywood every year.  Surely some of those are writers and not just 19 year old starlets hopefuls tragically destined for porn.  I should mention, also, that Christian Slater is the ‘star’ of this movie, even though he’s on screen for about two minutes or so.  Because he’s INVISIBLE!  I wonder how much he got for this gig.  A couple days of work, a day of voice over… 

On the bright side, the DVD extras are quite good.  The director and SFX guys go into detail on how to make a movie special effects and visual effects on the cheap, and actually distinguish between special and visual effects.  Another featurette goes into four stages of an FX scene from dude in green suit to the final product.  Actually showing you how little time Slater actually spent on set.

You don’t rent these things for the DVD extras though.  After watching this one, I needed some of those cliché antacids that the haggard police chief kept taking to help him cope with his clichéd ‘out of control detective’ with the razor stubble.  Avoid.