When I arrived at my local multiplex this evening, the
following movies were sold out: The
Grinch, Unbreakable,
Bounce, Little
Nicky, Men of Honor
and The 6th Day. What's a reviewer to do? Being an expert on the
movies, I buy a ticket for Charlie's
Angels and then go see The 6th Day. Before you call the
police and have me taken away, it might interest you to know that when
a movie is sold out, that doesn't mean all the tickets are sold. They stop
selling when the number of seats sold makes it unlikely for couples, like
the two young people sitting behind me who talked and laughed loudly throughout
the entire movie, to find two seats together. Anyway, I found a seat.
Now where was I? Oh ya. I went to see The 6th Day and it was good.
You never know with Arnie. He has his good-good movies like True
Lies and T2, his good-bad
movies like Predator and
Total Recall and his bad-bad
movies like End of Days and
Eraser. The 6th
Day is a funny entertaining movie that actually has a script!
There's some similarity to Total
Recall as Arnie plays a regular guy who unwittingly gets involved in
a huge conspiracy. In Total
Recall, it turns out that he really was a super-spy with amnesia but
in The 6th Day, Arnie is just a regular guy but hey, he's Arnie
so he can handle it when he gets involved in a huge conspiracy and this
time he has the right partner, himself! As anyone who knows that a dimpled
chad should count as a vote knows, the plot of The 6th Day involves
Arnie being cloned and as he says in the trailer, "You cloned the wrong
man!" Anyway, Arnie plays a guy who runs a helicopter-ski-trip company
in a beautiful American city that looks a lot like Vancouver. He
is happily married and his biggest worry is that his dog has died and his
wife wants to replace the dog with a clone. Yes, this is the future and
cloning is possible and allowed, except for humans. Cloning humans is illegal,
hence the title of the movie which refers to the 6th day of creation.
All of a sudden, Arnie comes home and finds that there's another Arnie
living his life and that people are shooting at him. The plot is a bit
convoluted but it hangs together pretty well. I don't want to give
too much away but the CEO of the company that owns all the cloning technology
(Tony Goldwyn) and his chief scientist (Robert Duvall) have secrets that
they are trying to cover up. Arnie is cloned by mistake as part of the
cover-up and then, of course, Goldwyn sends his henchmen to correct the
mistake by killing Arnie. The henchmen, played very entertainingly
by Sarah Wynter, Michael Rooker, and Rodney Rowland, are like the Keystone
Kops with a difference. Every time Arnie kills them, new ones are cloned
to replace them. Why they keep cloning such dumb henchmen is just another
part of Evil Genius Syndrome. Goldwyn is a good bad-guy. He's
done it before, most memorably in Ghost.
Robert Duvall is good as usual but doesn't stretch himself as an actor
playing the man who makes the cloning possible. The script is very
well written and the clone jokes, of which there are many, are actually
funny. The movie stays interesting right to the end as Arnie and
Arnie battle evil and try to figure out which of them is the clone.
Arnie can't exactly act but he can be funny and entertaining with a script
and a director. This film is directed with a nice pace and look by
Roger Spottiswoode who has directed such wildly different films as Tomorrow
Never Dies, and Turner and
Hooch. And what's all this about Arnie looking old. He looks
great. This is my second sci-fi film in the last two weeks and I
was happy to see that yet again Duct Tape is irreplaceable in the future.
If you like Arnie at all then I recommend that you see The 6th Day.
In this case, two Arnies are better than one.