A selectively serious and selectively silly hybrid of Wells's invisible man and Matheson's incredible shrinking one: what the titular memoirist gets from the latter is his unwilling participation in a government experiment gone awry. The silliness tends to dominate, or more accurately tends not to be overcome by eye-dropper doses of low-intensity seriousness, so that the general result is on a par with a joked-up pastiche by Joe Dante. We expect better, or once did, from John Carpenter. The hero, loosely termed, starts out as a cold and aloof self-seeker whose sudden invisibility can be seen (so to speak) as a kind of poetic justice or poetic license or poetic something: "He was invisible before he was invisible." But there's little time for existential soul searching when the plot veers immediately and interminably into a pursuit by government agents who see only the espionage potential. The optical tricks are well done and wide-ranging, but not wide-enough-ranging that the spectator is not still able to see Chevy Chase even when no one else on screen can. That, while perfectly conventional, is both a bitter disappointment and a distinct liability, although it must be admitted that Chase is funnier when trying to be serious than he'd been for some years when trying to be funny. Daryl Hannah, Sam Neill. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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