Director: John Carpenter
Cast: Chevy Chase, Daryl Hannah, Sam Neill, Michael McKean
Have I Seen it Before: Oddly (and somewhat horrifyingly, as it turns out) enough, I’m reasonably certain that this is the only of Carpenter’s directorial efforts (so far… he said somewhat hopefully, while at the same time ignoring The Ward (2010)) that I saw during its original theatrical run.
Did I Like It: I mean, I don’t want to knock a guy like Carpenter while he’s down. But if he were here, I can’t imagine he’d defend the movie. Hell, it appears to be his only directorial effort that doesn’t have his name above the title. Everything here seems like it almost works, which is all the more frustrating. Carpenter making what amounts to a loose remake of <North by Northwest (1959)> is strong enough of a pitch to paper over most problems in most movies. Now that I type this, I think we should all collectively let him just do that. He can do it from his couch. We’re not that picky.
The special effects are a unique blend. We have the pointedly retro, as Chase pulls a pretty eerie echo of Claude Rains unwrapping of the bandages from The Invisible Man (1933), and what I’m pretty sure is some stop motion animation when Chase tries to prove to a camera in an empty room that he is in fact invisible by chewing some gum. It also manage to display some more cutting edge tricks by animating just what happens to an invisible body when it tries to smoke or eat.
And that’s where things start to fall apart. There are few performers that come to mind who are more throughly dominated by their ego than Chevy Chase. Hence, any attempt the film makes to reach for tragedy or pathos in the plight of Nick Halloway have to be immediately undone because in the 90s Chase couldn’t possibly end a film without him successfully seducing his leading lady. He’s not very believable or interesting in the role, and in a trend that was going to come up a lot more as the 90s trudged on for him, he isn’t very funny, either. What else is there? Somewhere in that spectrum had to be where he was aiming.