Why The Director Of Robocop Hated His Horror Movie With Kevin Bacon - SlashFilm (2025)

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Despite the fact that critics lambasted it at the time of its release, and audiences learned to hate it over time (with a small percentage who now treat it as a cult horror), I will die as a "Hollow Man" fan one day. Paul Verhoeven's 2000 feature is a bonkers, pseudo-serious B horror that slowly turns into a devilish guilty pleasure over its nearly two-hour runtime.

However, it was perhaps fair to ask at the time: Did it live up to the high standards the Dutch director established with all-time classics such as "Robocop," "Starship Troopers," or "Total Recall"? It did not. Has it offered any profound message under its CGI and science-heavy context whatsoever? Nope. Was it mean and unmitigated fun for young horror lovers? Hell yeah! Did it have Kevin Bacon embracing his inner villain and donning a s***-eating grin all the time? It sure did.

What I'm saying is that "Hollow Man" was a solid and entertaining horror with some obvious flaws. But moviegoers were certainly capable of looking past those issues since the film quickly became a box office success, making a whopping $190 million worldwide — critics and naysayers be damned! Still, given how self-critical Verhoeven was and is, it's interesting to learn that he also loathed his movie for years after making it. Briefly reflecting on the past in a 2013 interview for The Hollywood Reporter, the director said:

"I decided after 'Hollow Man,' this is a movie, the first movie that I made that I thought I should not have made. It made money and this and that, but it really is not me anymore. I think many other people could have done that. I don't think many people could have made 'Robocop' that way, or either 'Starship Troopers.' But 'Hollow Man,' I thought there might have been 20 directors in Hollywood who could have done that. I felt depressed with myself after 2002."

Columbia Pictures

It's hard to argue against the director's words, but I think he was a bit too hard on himself. Sure, "Hollow Man" didn't leave behind a legacy like "Robocop" or "Basic Instinct" have — though it did receive a horrendous sequel with Christian Slater six years later — but I'm unsure if 20 other filmmakers could've made it the same way. It might've been just another B horror, but the film needed Verhoeven's capable hands and own directing style, not to mention his supervision over the chilling special effects, to hold it all together and deliver a suspenseful, if at times over-the-top, action horror.

The stellar cast also helped with the appeal. I mean, it's quite rare these days to bring together the caliber of talent that "Hollow Man" featured back then. Starting with Kevin Bacon, who clearly had a helluva time playing the villain, a gorgeous and nifty heroine in Elizabeth Shue, or a restrained and still relatively little-known Josh Brolin as the good guy. It also didn't hurt to add the bombshell Rhona Mitra for good measure, along with Kim Dickens and William Devane.

Overall, I believe "Hollow Man" is criminally underrated (evidently by its own director, among others), even if we eventually got a superior and better-made movie exploring the same idea of invisibility with Leigh Whannell's modern classic, "The Invisible Man," two decades later.