“The Invisible Man”

Series premiere Friday,

8 p.m., Sci Fi Channel

1/2

TOMORROW night, Sci Fi begins a whole new series based on a series of great old movies, “The Invisible Man.” This is good.

Unfortunately, there is nothing extraordinary in New York City about invisible men. There are millions of them and remarkably they usually vanish into thin air immediately after saying, “Hey – I’ll call you!”

The star of Sci Fi’s new series, Vincent Ventresca (as Darien Fawkes) certainly looks like the type of guy who’s done his fair share of disappearing acts, so right off, they got the right guy for the role.

The first 15 minutes of the pilot episode are flat out great. Fawkes is a small-time crook/cat burglar in the middle of happily robbing an office when the owner walks in, sees him and promptly has a heart attack.

Fawkes who’s not a bad guy -really – tries giving the old guy CPR, and when a cop catches him, he thinks Fawkes is actually molesting an innocent senior citizen.

Fawkes is put on trial for geriatric molestation and the old guy (who revives just in time to see Fawkes on top of him) is just hilarious.

“Bastid!” he proclaims during the trial. “The S.O.B. robbed me of my manhood! What am I gonna tell my grandchildren?”

Anyway, luckily or unluckily, Fawkes’ brother is a big scientist and he springs Fawkes from jail and uses him to test out his invisible-man formula. So far, so good. (And so are the special effects.)

Right about this time, however, the show goes south, (for my taste anyway) and gets all action/adventury when it should have stayed sci/fi.

The original never veered from its really brilliant premise and that’s why they are still to this day making sequels like this one.

Anyway, a mad scientist and some secret agents get involved and much shooting and chasing takes place. What else is new.

Anyway, later in the pilot, Fawkes’ sidekick Hobbes (Paul Ben-Victor) is introduced. Hobbes works for some under-funded secret government organization that recruits Fawkes, because Fawkes has no choice. They have the dissappearing antedote.

A good gimick is that Hobbes is a crooked guy obsessed with his civil-service pay scale. He’s constantly trying to find out who’s a C-7 and why he’s a C-6 or something. And Ben-Victor is very good in that Danny DeVito-kind of way that’s been missing from the tube.

The director, Breck Eisner, is a commercial director, and maybe that’s why the first 15 minutes are so good and then it gets kinda boring and predictable. It’s the attention-span thing.

In all fairness, I have a predjudice. I believe every human is born with a gene that allows them to watch only so many action-adventure movies/TV shows (the gene varies from person to person) before madness sets in.

I tragically reached my limit last year from dating a man who refuses to watch anything that doesn’t involve Kung Fu and big fake monsters.

So, while I got bored with “Invisible Man,” the Love Interest was semi-riveted.

So the show has possibilities.

Think of it this way: If “LaFemme Nikita” married “The Three Stooges” (the TV movie) their baby would be “The Invisible Man” (the TV show.)