The 6th Day

MPAA Rated – PG-13
It’s 2:04 Long
A Review by:
The Dude on the Right

The 6th Day
Movie Stats & Links
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Rapaport, Tony Goldwyn
MPAA Rated: PG-13
Released By: Columbia Pictures
Kiddie Movie: Not too young but fine for teens.
Date Movie: She might get a chuckle or two, or just see how useless and weak you are.
Gratuitous Sex: Close, and mostly in the virtual world.
Gratuitous Violence: Legs get blown off, so do fingers, and they have cool ray guns.
Action: Lots of it.
Laughs: Just what you would expect from an Arnold movie.
Memorable Scene: The bad guy standing there, hopping around on one leg.
Memorable Quote: “When I told you to screw yourself I didn’t mean to take it literally.
Directed By: Roger Spottiswoode
Produced By: Mike Medavoy, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jon Davison

I was ready to give “The 6th Day” a 5 star rating. Schwarzenegger was back in a role he could play best, the story mixed some fun with some action, and I was just totally enjoying the movie. Then came the ending and all I could say to myself was “What the hell was that?” Before I get to that, here’s the story.

It’s the not to distant future, a future where cars can drive on their own, where helicopters turn into jets, where you can have a virtual girlfriend who will give you virtual sex whenever you want, and where, when your pet dies, you can have it instantly cloned so it looks just like you old pet, even better if you want, and will still remember everything you taught it. But if they can clone pets why can’t they clone humans? Well, an experiment gone wrong made it illegal to clone humans, but when you’re the richest man in all of existence and can hide your lab from everyone, who says you can’t clone someone?

So, we’ve got Arnold as Adam Gibson, he runs a helicopter charter service, mostly running snowboard geeks to a mountaintop, but he just scored a deal to charter Michael Drucker, owner of an XFL team among other things (Tony Goldwyn), and the most powerful man in the world (I would start keeping my eye on Vince McMahon right now). One day Adam comes home to find his family celebrating his birthday without him, only he is there, and then Adam finds out he was cloned. Simple story – he now wants his life back, has to figure out how to get it, and of course in doing so he kills a lot of bad dudes and a dudette who keep messing with him because, well, each time Adam does them in, well, they get cloned back into existence. I won’t go into the story more than that, because, well, it doesn’t need any more set-up and there are some things in the story that are more entertaining (it surprised me how long it took so many people around me couldn’t figure out why Adam got cloned) if found out on your own.

“The 6th Day” is just classic Arnold, which I would have never guessed from the stupid trailers that were shown before the movie came out. From those the movie didn’t really make sense, but as I watched it, “The 6th Day” ranked up there with a “Total Recall”, “True Lies”, and even some “Terminator 2”. You had the fun action scenes, you had the dorky jokes, you had the creepy characters, and you even had Robert Duval wondering if his cloning science really is the right thing (and a set-up for, hmm, would it be called “The 7th Day”). And all was well until “The 6th Day” gave me this sappy-ass ending, with the whole “you’re just as much a part of this family and here’s why” crap, and I suppose maybe the ending even gave a sequel set-up, but it just made me scratch my head in wonder how you could make such a classic Arnold movie and screw it up in the last 5 minutes. Even the two dudes next to me said to each other “What was that?”

So, it was going to be a 5 star review but with that ending it drops to 4 stars out of 5. If you are an Arnold fan “The 6th Day” should entertain you in the same way the classic Arnold flicks have. If you aren’t an Arnold fan, it’s still a pretty good action movie that you can bring your teens to and not feel too weird (except maybe at the virtual girl scenes).

That’s it for this one! I’m The Dude on the Right!! L8R!!!