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 rnold Schwarzenegger's "The Sixth Day" is really
a Comedy, and anyone who doesn't want to be bored to death by its oh so routine
action sequences should treat the film as such. The film deals with the subject
of human cloning, but if you thought this was a serious dissertation on said
subject, you're hopelessly gullible. Besides offering the Big S the opportunity
to act opposite himself, the film also offers the Big S the opportunity to punch
himself. As Jet Li ("The
One") and Jean-Claude van Damme ("Double Impact") can testify
to, you are not a big Hollywood action star until you've been in a film where
you get to kick the crap out of yourself.
"The Sixth Day" opens in the near future where
human cloning has been outlawed, everyone has flat screen computer monitors,
football players make $300 million a year, and animals can be cloned before the
kid it belongs to even knows it's dead. The sequence of events that sets up the
movie's main plot is rather convoluted, so I'll give everyone a brief,
easy-to-understand rundown now.
The Big S plays Adam Gibson, an Everyman helicopter pilot
with a wife and kid. Gibson's business partner is Hank (Michael Rapaport), a
happy-go-lucky, virtual sex-addicted goofball who one day does a switcheroo with
Gibson and flies a big shot businessman name Drucker to a mountain retreat.
Gibson was scheduled to fly, but because it's his birthday, Hank has offered to
take over. There is an assassination attempt at the retreat and Drucker, along
with Hank, are killed. But because Drucker's associates believe it was Gibson
who was killed and not Hank, they clone Gibson in order to cover up the
businessman's murder, since Drucker himself will also be (voluntarily) cloned --
once again. By the time Drucker's goons figure out that it was Hank and not
Gibson who had died, they attempt to cover up their cover-up by taking out one
of the two existing Gibsons. You see, if word got out that Drucker is a clone,
he would lose all of his fortune.
Got it?
Toward the end of the film, the movie reveals to us who the
cloned Gibson is, but of course anyone who has been paying attention knows
who is the clone and who is the real Gibson. The movie undermines its own
supposedly "shocking" twist by spelling out the whole who-is-clone bit
almost immediately. Were we supposed to not figure it out?
Once Gibson discovers there's another guy with his face and
personality kissing his wife and tucking in his kid, things turn action-packed.
Evil Capitalist Pig Drucker, whose sole ambition is to make money and live
forever, has dispatched four colorful gunmen to chase down Gibson. The beautiful
Sarah Wynter (TV's "24") plays one of the gunmen (or is the correct
phrase gunwoman?) who keep coming back to life via cloning. The movie's funnier
segments have Gibson wryly annoyed that the gunmen keeps coming back alive after
he kills them, and the cloned gunmen feeling the after-effects of their many
"deaths".
"The Sixth Day", as previously stated, works best
as a Comedy. The screenplay by Cormac and Marianne Wibberley makes a couple of
attempts at approaching the topics of Godhood, mortality, and loss, but it's all
for naught. The movie's loud slam-bang action sequences overpower any attempt at
sober discussion about the troublesome notion of human cloning. The dialogue is
quite funny, and the film is rife with comedic moments, such as when Gibson
shoots off a gunman's leg. In another scene, Gibson shoots off another person's
fingers (by accident) and uses the person's severed thumb as a sort of keycard
throughout the rest of the movie!
Director Roger Spottiswoode has a mammoth budget at his
disposal and the movie is slick, expensive, and glossy as a result. It's all you
expect from a big budget Hollywood movie starring the Big S, but unfortunately
that's all there is. Once Gibson discovers, uh, himself, the movie becomes a
retread of the Big S's other past films, most notably "Total
Recall". There's a lot of running, shooting, and slick special effects
throughout. Did you expect anything less?
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