The Invisible Man (2020)

THE INVISIBLE MAN (2020) *
I should have called the cops on The Invisible Man.

The latest remake of an old Universal Studios warhorse, The Invisible Man gives viewers two hours of domestic violence. That makes it a relentlessly unpleasant and positively joyless viewing experience, and definitely not what I expected from an Invisible Man movie. Obviously, it’s my problem that I entered The Invisible Man expecting a grand old entertainment and received something else that produced the barest minimum of entertainment value.

I know, I know, shame on me.

Recently, I watched The Invisible Woman, Invisible Agent, and The Invisible Man’s Revenge to complete the series of six Invisible Man pictures that began in 1933 with James Whale’s classic and ended in 1951 with Abbott and Costello Meet The Invisible Man. I give five of the six films positive reviews and they’re all entertaining in their own ways — yes, even The Invisible Woman has its moments, few and far between but nonetheless they’re visible.

Invisible Agent wisely took the series in a new direction — a different one from the wrong hard left turn made by The Invisible Woman — incorporating Nazis, Nazi spies, spying against Nazis, and Peter Lorre into the formula. It’s hard not to watch Invisible Agent and think Steven Spielberg loved the movie growing up and it later informed Raiders of the Lost Ark, especially Ronald Lacey’s Peter Lorre-like character.

The Invisible Man’s Revenge returns to the roots of the series and the title describes the plot.

Here’s the length of the first six Invisible Man pictures: 71 minutes, 81, 72, 81, 78, and 82, all well below the 124 minutes offered by the 2020 version.

However, the new Invisible Man contributes maybe five minutes of entertainment value and it’s one of those films I liked less and less as it traveled down a long and predictable road. The earlier Invisible Man films move along briskly, while this marvel of modern technology belabors everything to such a degree that a three-toed sloth dipped in molasses moves faster.

Aside from the invisibility hook and the Griffin surname for the title character and his slimy brother, the new Invisible Man has a lot more in common with the 1991 Julia Roberts battered woman hit Sleeping with the Enemy. By calling it The Invisible Man brand name, though, expectations are high for entertainment, but that’s not what it offers in the slightest so it set itself up for its own failure.

I generally distrust remakes, reboots, sequels, etc., and I am sure that many of us do in varying degrees. I love it when viewers of all demographics bitch and complain about old movies, how they’re crusty and slow-moving and not in color, but they’re plundered from on a regular basis most often with inferior storytelling craft by the new guard.

The Invisible Man director and writer Leigh Whannell previously brought us the first three Saw movies, and so the fact that his Invisible Man wallows in and lingers over domestic violence should be of little or no surprise. Whannell wrote the story or screenplay or both for all three, and starred as Adam Faulkner-Stanheight in Saw. I managed to mostly avoid the once seemingly interminable Saw series, catching only one of the seven films churned out by the foremost torture porn assembly line in seven years. For some unknown reason even to me, I watched Saw IV and hated just about every single millisecond of it. All these years later, I only remember thinking they should have called it Fuck with an exclamation point because that’s about the only dialogue used with any regularity.

Never fear, fans of Whannell and rehashes and Whannell rehashes, because Wolfman and Escape from New York are in pre-production.

Fuck!