THE 6TH DAY (2000)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
There are great Arnold Schwarzenegger movies ("The Terminator I and II") and there are good ones ("Commando," "The Running Man" and "Total Recall") and there are decent flicks ("Red Heat"). Then there are outright atrocities and fair near-misses like "Eraser." "The 6th Day" belongs in the near-miss category. It has a great timely concept that fails to deliver on its very own potential.
Directed by Roger Spottiswoode ("Tomorrow Never Dies"), "The 6th Day" stars Schwarzenegger as Adam Gibson, a pilot who flies skiers to a distant resort. His partner is Hank (the dependable Michael Rappaport) and both are owners of Double-X Charters. Since this story is set in the not-so-distant future, Adam also has a remote that can activate a helicopter to fly without a pilot. One day, Hank stands in for Adam and flies a rich, powerful man, Drucker (Tony Goldwyn), to the distant ski resort until trouble ensues and everyone is killed by some skier armed with a laser gun. Apparently, Adam was to be killed, not Hank. It turns out that Adam's life is about to turn upside down when he discovers that his wife and daughter are living with an exact double of Adam! Welcome to the world of cloning, which is outlawed in the future except for animals and if you are caught cloning a human, you are subject to a stiff jail sentence and destruction of the clone. But Drucker and other assorted villains are always cloning themselves so in essence, the bad guys never actually die - there is always a replacement. Adam now has to contend with Drucker and his henchmen and a forlorn cloning scientist, Dr. Weir (Robert Duvall), who has his doubts about the future of this immoral experiment. But why did they clone Adam?
"The 6th Day" begins promisingly with a wonderfully imaginative scenario, and there are plenty of nifty ideas throughout. We are shown that in the future cars can drive by themselves, lifelike dolls can communicate similar emotions like a young child (though the one doll shown might make younger kids scream), you can order groceries through computerized refrigerators (which you can do now), and someone like Hank can have a virtual girlfriend who will do anything to please him. Yes, yes, we have seen some of these ideas before, the latter being the basis for "The Lawnmower Man," but rarely so engagingly or matter-of-factly.
The movie's basic theme is Frankenstein revisited, bringing up the moral questions of what happens when you bring back the dead. If someone is cloned, is the person still human and does he/she have a soul? And how does one separate one clone from the next, and what would it be like for a clone to co-exist with the original model? Such good ideas are introduced but left asunder in favor of plenty of laser gun fights and car chases galore. "The 6th Day" never bothers to explore the questions it presents. There are glimmers of the movie's theme occasionally, particularly in the touching scenes between Duvall's Weir and his dying wife who had been cloned once before. But it is hard to get a handle on Schwarzenegger's Adam who seems to be doing heavy breathing throughout and little else. The screenplay never allows much focus on Adam's family, who are left skirting the edges of the movie's blowout action scenes. Arnie still has the steely presence he always had but lacks the vigor and humor he usually brings to his roles. His last sentimental scene is a travesty and emotionally off-kilter when you consider one of the unsurprising twists in the movie's latter half.
The villains themselves are so threadbare that I could have cared less about them or their plight. They die, they are cloned, they die and they are cloned again. Big deal. Goldwyn's Drucker never seems like a real threat - the actor was a more convincing villain in "Ghost." Poor Michael Rooker played an exasperated assassin who also does a lot of heavy breathing but never seems involved.
"The 6th Day" is overlong and padded with excessive action scenes but it never actually takes flight. Don't get me wrong - there is some imagination at work here. It's just that with all the right tools and all the right notes, it never reaches fruition.
