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The Sixth Day

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A Techtite Review

The Film : It seems like forever since Arnold Schwarzenegger came out with an action film. Even Kindergarten Cop was years ago. I admit, this is because of a recent heart ailment, as well as the end of the movie company, Corolco, which backed a majority of his best work (Total Recall and Terminator 2, to name just a pair of them). With that being said, The Sixth Day is a great, long awaited return of Arnold as the action hero, even if it does have a few flaws.

The story involves the near future, a la Total Recall. Little girls' dolls now have chips that allow them to have conversations, and even imitate emotions. A deceased family pet can be returned via "RePet," a service that clones the old pooch or kitty as if it never died. Human cloning, however, has been outlawed, although the technology is there. Adam Gibson (Schwarzenegger) learns this the hard way, when he comes home after a hard day's work, and looks through the front window, to see "himself" blowing out the candles of his birthday cake!

How did this happen? Well, he's a pilot that owns his own charter business, and while flying millionaire techno-whiz Michael Drucker (Tony Goldwyn) one day, something went terribly awry. This is where the complications arise, because Drucker is the owner of Replacement Technologies, as well as the head of their secretive, human-cloning experiments. A technical error causes them to believe Adam was killed in a flight accident, so they immediately clone him, due to his contract as the pilot for Drucker. However, with two Adams alive at once, there's an added complication that people will discover Drucker's secret cloning experiments, and shut him down. Like any typical bad guy, his rash solution to the problem is to have one of the Adams terminated.

As you'd expect, this leads to action scenes galore, as Schwarzenegger battles a number of Drucker's best cronies. The unique twist, here, is that whenever he defeats them in a big way, Drucker just clones them again, and sends them off to do his bidding once more. The result is amusing, particularly when one of these hit men is a hypochondriac, and constantly "still feels" the pain in his neck or body from his earlier self's demise. The leader of these hit men (or should I say hit-persons?) is Talia (Sarah Wynter), who is pretty easy on the eyes if it wasn't for the blue hair. As you'd expect, they never defeat Adam, no matter how many times they try...and try...and try.

There are some amusing moments that arise in this story. People have mused that the overall plot could easily be a sequel to Total Recall, and to me that's a very good thing. Special effects are admirable, though admittedly not as good as earlier films in Schwarzenegger's career, including Recall. Action scenes are effective, and there's even an amusing plot twist at the end. What more could a Schwarzenegger fan want from an action film?

The problems here are obvious, when looking at the plot with more than two-dimensional thinking. Obviously, there can't be two Schwarzenegger heroes, no matter how much you want there to be, so one must get the short end of the stick, inevitably. It's not like his wife wants to be a semi-bigamist, married to two of the same husband! A similar problem is, quite frankly, the idea of two versions of the same action hero has been done over and over already, and a more lighthearted look at the concept of cloning --a la Multiplicity-- would've been much better.

There are other flaws I had with the film as well. For one thing, sorry, Sarah Wynter makes for too cute of a villain to cheer when she's defeated by Schwarzenegger over and over. Blue hair and all, she just doesn't exude the villainous mystique that Sharon Stone had in Recall. As for her evil leader, Goldwyn performs Drucker a bit too low-key, much like a Bill Gates with a conspiracy agenda. When he's inevitably up against  Schwarzenegger himself, there's little guesswork as to who will win. It's like Chris Rock being put in a ring with Mike Tyson; he's got some snappy one-liners, though he's inevitably going to get pounded.

This is one of those typical films where you're left feeling the film could've been better, so very easily. Perhaps even with as little as one script rewrite, it could have been one of the better moments in Schwarzenegger's career. However, it is his first action film in years, and it's a welcome change for the better after so-so comedies like Jingle All The Way. As a fan of his action films, I enjoyed the film enough for a marginal recommendation, though admittedly, it could have been a bit better.

The DVD : One of the more amusing additions to this DVD is the ability to see the "Re-Pet" infomercial and TV spots, as made for the film. These were only shown in monitors when Arnold was checking out the Re-Pet offer, and now you get to see the mock infomercials and commercials made for the film, separate from the movie. Cute addition. I wish that they'd made a revision of the "Total Recall" DVD, and make a similar bonus feature, of all the amusing "Rekall" commercials shown in the film.

Most other bonus features are technical. There are 2 animatics, as well as 3 storyboard comparisons, as they slowly were adapted into the film. An isolated music track is available, with commentary by the film's composer, Trevor Rabin. A making of featurette is offered, with what is allegedly "10" featurettes, which based on their lengths seems more like several separate segments of an intended featurette, divided so you can get to just the behind-the-scenes moment you're looking for. All this leads to a nice bunch of extras, though admittedly they are for the techno-savvy, and might not be as interesting to the average movie-goer who'd prefer either deleted scenes or a blooper reel.

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