The 6th Day
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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.