This is not classic Arnold, by any means, but at the very least it recalls his better days.
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The last time we saw Big Arnold on the big screen, he was battling the devil in "End of Days." It was no match. This time he has a more formidable foe--himself. Directed by Roger Spottiswoode, the film bears a marked resemblance to the director´s previous effort, the Bond flick "Tomorrow Never Dies," utilizing the same slick, high-tech, metallic look, which may or may not appeal to everyone. All the same, one thing is certain: "The 6th Day" is the best work Schwarzenegger has done since "True Lies," thanks to his usual self-effacing humor and a gimmick worthy of "Total Recall." This is not classic Arnold, by any means, but at the very least it recalls his better days.
In Genesis we read, "So God created Man in his own image... And the evening and the morning were the sixth day." Arnold took a little longer. The time setting is the near future, an age when the cloning of animals has become commonplace but the cloning of humans is banned. Seems scientists tried cloning a human and it didn´t quite work out the way they expected. The film is foggy on the details, but it intimates that science was successful at duplicating the body of a person but not the mind. Too complex. Anyhow, that doesn´t stop some unscrupulous folks from doing just what the government doesn´t want them to do, namely, cloning humans in secret. Thus, the premise of the movie.
Arnold plays Adam (the Biblical slant) Gibson, a helicopter charter pilot. Michael Rapaport plays his partner. Imagine Arnold´s surprise when one night he goes home to his own birthday party and finds himself already there! Yep, he looks in through his living room window and sees another him in his place, holding his daughter and kissing his wife. Then, before he can enter the house, a couple of heavies show up to cart him away. He escapes, and the rest of the film is basically a chase between Arnold on the one hand and the evil cloning corporations on the other.
The best part about the story, though, is that we are never positive which Arnold is the real one and which one is the clone. Remember "Total Recall," where we were never sure if Arnold was just dreaming the whole thing or not? Same deal. What´s more, Arnold has nobody to turn to. The authorities have been told he´s a mental patient, so he can´t even go to the police. Paranoia runs deep.
The head baddies are played by Robert Duvall as Dr. Griffin Weir, a world-ranking geneticist, and Tony Goldwyn as Michael Drucker, a multibillionaire head of, among other things, an animal cloning empire, RePet, that fronts for the human cloning operation. You recall Goldwyn as the snake in "Ghost." Same guy here. The RePet angle is cute. Your pet dies so you get it replaced by an exact replica. Apparently, animal minds are less susceptible to corruption than human minds. Makes you stop and think, you know?
Regardless, I wish I could say that any of this is more than standard action-movie fare, but it isn´t. The movie is enhanced by the clever cloning gambit and by Arnold´s presence, but that´s about the extent of it. Director Spottiswoode doesn´t do much that he didn´t do in the Bond film, only this time it seems even more tired than before. Every scene is shaded in dark metallic tones, every plot device is highlighted by stock action-movie musical cues, every brief scene is cut into thirty different MTV edits. Even the usual Bond double entendres are in evidence. People chase each other, bullets (and lasers) fly, helicopters buzz around, and stuff blows up. Nothing new. By the time the ending rolls around, the whole cloning business has run out of steam, and the script is merely repeating itself, like one of those old endless-loop tape cartridges that keeps playing the same songs over and over again.
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[release]6498[/release]