Oct 022000
 
two reels

Adam Gibson (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a helicopter charter pilot, skips out of work on the day he was supposed to fly powerful businessman Michael Drucker (Tony Goldwyn) to the mountains, letting his partner take his place. Later, his partner doesn’t show up at a bar and when Adam arrives home, he finds a clone of himself already there and a group of assassins trying to kill him, led by Robert Marshall (Michael Rooker). While cloning pets is common, cloning humans is illegal, so Adam knows he’s in the middle of a conspiracy to cover up a mistake in the labs of geneticist Dr. Griffin Weir (Robert Duvall).

A retread of the superior Total Recall, Arnold is once again an average family man (with huge biceps and a thick accent—you know, the guy next door) who ends up in the middle of a secret plot that causes identify confusion. But this time, the question is, which Adam is the real Adam and which is the clone?  Since it turns out not to matter, it’s annoying that the film spends so much time worrying about it.

Arnold can do the guns and fists action in his sleep, and even with the pedestrian directing of Roger Spottiswoode, who thinks random slow motion and warped screen flashbacks are the height of excitement (they’re not), Arnold delivers. He’s not so capable in the happy family scenes which are painful to watch.

Thematically, The 6th Day is a mess. Sounding more like a traveling preacher, it states, over and over, that cloning is bad. Why is cloning bad? Because it is. Bad people do cloning, and it’s bad. Are you getting the idea that cloning is bad yet? Problematically, the film shows the opposite. Apparently the future world is being fed due to cloning (I have doubts on how that worked). Their cloning technique is perfect (as long as Arnold doesn’t blow up the lab while a clone is being grown), so no problems there.  And souls aren’t an issue either as the film makes it clear that cloned Arnold is every bit as human as original Arnold. So, why is cloning bad? I haven’t a clue, but like that threadbare evangelist, it keeps saying the same thing.

The film runs too long, adding in an unnecessary and uninteresting side story about Dr. Griffin’s motivation for cloning and his sick wife. I suppose they paid for Duvall and then figured they should do something with him. A bit of judicious editing would do wonders.

The villains are all acceptable, but look pale next to past foes Arnold has defeated. There’s enough mild humor for the genre and plenty of gadgets for the background (although many, like the doll with real hair, feel like they were taken from an early draft of Total Recall).

Don’t expect more than a mediocre Arnold shoot-’em-up and you’ll be satisfied with The 6th Day.

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