File under: Great directors chaperoning someone else’s vanity project.
Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) wasn’t Carpenter’s film (he’ll tell you that himself) he was supposedly brought in to replace Ivan Reitman after the tone fell apart. Chevy Chase wanted a sci-fi thriller that would make people take him seriously, while Warner Bros wanted effects and Carpenter, consummate professional that he is, punched his card and did his best to work through the stacks of studio notes.
The pitch is decent enough: investment yuppie gets zapped by a science snafu and ends up on the run from the CIA. But instead of going for the horror and paranoia inherent in the premise, we get a light tech thriller in the middle of a mid-life-crisis. A fairly enjoyable one at that.
Chevy Chase isn’t bad here, he’s just… not all there. You can feel him trying to rein it in and drop the sarcasm; to actually act – but the performance is on the hollow side. He shows up to do the work, but just barely, it’s like watching someone try to do sincerity phonetically.
The visual effects are still impressive though. Industrial Light & Magic threw every trick they had at the screen – This thing was an optical playground, and Carpenter directed every last molecule. He shoots nothing like it’s something. It may be one of his least personal films, but you can still see the craftsmanship.
Memoirs is rarely considered among his best movies, but it has a lot of fans, me included. I love seeing it, or not, on the shelf with Hollow Man and Invisible: The Chronicles of Benjamin Knight. -Pop