Noetling’s Notables

Film Reviews that Don’t Suck

The 6^th Day

Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tony Goldwyn, Robert Duvall, Michael Rappaport, Michael Rooker.

Written by Cormac Wibberley and Marianne Wibberley

Directed by Roger Spottiswoode.

I really, really wanted to like this film. What red-blooded american male doesn’t like Arnold movies. From Conan and Terminator to T2 and True Lies, Arnold is the premier action film star. He’s good at what he does, and he’s profitable.

Unfortunately, as his paychecks have risen to near ludicrous levels, his acting ability has fallen in inverse proportion. He also doesn’t seem to have the ability to choose good scripts anymore. Be that as it may, when you go into an Arnold movie, you have some expectations, and they aren’t too high.

Arnie plays Adam Gibson, a whisper-helicopter pilot who owns his own "Extreme Adventure" tour agency. His partner is Michael Rappaport, who has ABSOLUTELY no chemistry with Arnie whatsoever. Danny DeVito, Tom Arnold, Edward Furlong, even Sandahl Bergman had chemistry with Arnie, Rappaport, he’s has the acting talents of a chalkboard eraser covered in chalk.

Anyway, it’s the future, "Not so far as you think" according to the credits. Yeah right. Everything that appears on screen has shown up somewhere else first. They have self-driving cars (Demolition Man), video screens that are internet linked EVERYWHERE (Babylon 5, Total Recall), you get the picture. Apparently the future is all bright and cheery, except that there’s these scientists who have figured out cloning. But there’s these nasty "6^th day" laws that prohibit human cloning. Doesn’t stop these guys from doing it anyway, AND perfecting the process so that they grow a bunch of blank bodies, and then, get this, transfer DNA AND MEMORIES into the blank. I don’t even want to go into the whole scientific implausibility of this, but I will say that the scenes with all the blanks in their tanks (blanks in their tanks, cats in their hats, whos in their whats, oh wait, Dr. Seuss is dead.) are creepy.

Oh and did I mention that there is NO DEGREDATION at all with the clones. I don’t know about you, but when I make a copy of something, it’s not as good as the original, and each generation gets worse and worse. Think about that photocopied cartoon of the fish in the blender with the caption "I can’t take the stress" that has been copied about 40 times. That’s what I’m talking about. This film doesn’t even touch on it. In fact, they tend to state that the clones are BETTER than the originals. Bwhaaaaaaaaaahhhhah hahhahahah hahahaha hahaha.

So anyway, the plot of this piece of dreck is that Arnie’s tour company contracts to take this multi-millionaire Drucker (Tony Goldwynn, perfectly evil I might add), on a ski trip. Only Arnie is supposed to fly the dude, but his good buddy Michael Rappaport, decides to take the flight instead. Now Drucker is the owner of "Re-Pet", as well as a fantastically successful XFL Franchise (that pays it’s star quarterback $300 MILLION a season. How implausible is that). Re-Pet takes your dead dog or cat, and makes a PERFECT clone of it. Well, add two and two together and what do you get? In this movie, a clone of the number 2.

Enough of the plot, suffice to say, it’s complicated, and not at the same time. I was hoping for more. They keep mentioning that ten years ago the first human clone was a disaster and that’s what led to the 6^th day laws. Blah blah blah. Nothing comes form that. Would have been cool if Arnie was the original clone hunh? With a name like Adam, that’s what I wanted to think. And of course, it would explain why he’s such a superstud action dude. But no, he was just a military genius from the Jungle War. Hunh? Oh and if you blink, you miss that throwaway line.

Oh it’s not all bad. There’s some groovy flying stuff with the whisper-helicopters. The cloning technology is nifty, and there’s some nice laser gun fights. In fact, the action sequences themselves are pretty nice. On the whole, if they decided to ditch the plot and filled it with 90 minutes of action sequences with no narrative, that’d be fine with me, but no, they STICK to the plot line. Whatever.

Oh and why is Robert Duvall in this thing? I guess he spent his Godfather millions. Oh wait, he was in Days of Thunder too.

So is it worth the money? Hmm…hard to say. If you’ve seen everything else, and can get in for cheap, then go for it. Otherwise, wait for video.

My rating: 2 out of 5 stars.