The Sixth Day (2000)

DIRECTOR: Roger Spottiswoode

CAST: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tony Goldwyn, Robert Duvall, Michael Rooker, Michael Rapaport, Wendy Crewson, Sarah Wynter, Terry Crews, Rodney Rowland

REVIEW:

The Sixth Day is a prime example of how an intriguing sci-fi premise can be squandered in the service of a generic action flick.  There is fertile ground for all kinds of ethical dilemmas and fascinating scenarios here, but the team assembled is not up to the task of bringing them to the screen.  And even for Arnold Schwarzenegger fans who only care about seeing the big guy kick some ass and take some names, The Sixth Day is lackluster.  Schwarzenegger has previously starred in a couple great sci-fi action thrillers–1984’s The Terminator and 1991’s Terminator 2–but he doesn’t continue that success here.

“In the not too distant future”, while the cloning of animals is widespread (replacing deceased pets with identical copies), the cloning of humans is illegal, banned by “sixth day laws” punishing the perpetrator with a lengthy prison sentence and destroying the clone.  However, Michael Drucker (Tony Goldwyn), one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, has a secret lab run by Dr. Griffin Weir (Robert Duvall) where cloning is carried out on a regular basis for everything from replacing a star football player fatally injured during a game to granting himself and his henchmen virtual immortality.  Adam Gibson (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is just a regular Joe Schmoe charter pilot (with Schwarzenegger-esque invincibility, of course), who has the bad luck one day to be hired to fly Drucker to an out-of-the-way ski lodge.  After switching with his partner Hank (Michael Rapaport), who agrees to fly Drucker in Gibson’s place (and under his name) so Adam can sneak away to replace his daughter’s beloved deceased dog with an identical “RePet” clone, Adam’s life is turned upside down when Drucker is assassinated by an anti-cloning fundamentalist, with Hank as collateral damage.  For Drucker, who’s got clones of himself on stand-by ready to step into his shoes (literally), being assassinated is little more than a momentary inconvenience, but Hank impersonating Adam during the flight leads to a case of mistaken identity.  Cloning Drucker means also replacing the supposedly deceased Adam to cover up the incident, and Adam goes home that night to find his life has been usurped by an imposter.  To make matters worse, Adam is being pursued by Drucker’s goons (Michael Rooker, Sarah Wynter, Terry Crews, Rodney Rowland) to clean up loose ends.  The existence of two Adam Gibsons is a major flub that could expose Drucker’s illegal activities.  Adam must simultaneously evade Drucker’s hitmen and find a way to get his life back.

There are a lot of interesting things that could have been done with the premise and various throwaway side aspects of The Sixth Day, but the fact that it stars Arnold Schwarzenegger should be a clue as to how deeply it’s going to be explored.  With the exception of the first two Terminator films, Schwarzenegger’s forte is not thought-provoking sci-fi, it’s simple straightforward action.  Alas, The Sixth Day does not succeed in that less demanding direction either.  There’s a lot of car chases, cat-and-mouse games, and people running frantically around, but Roger Spottiswoode doesn’t bring any flair to any of it, nor does he supply a single memorable action sequence (when a Schwarzenegger movie doesn’t even serve up decent action, the bare minimum one might reasonably expect from it, something is wrong).  There’s a feel of generic blandness from beginning to end.  The main character(s) being played by someone of Schwarzenegger’s limited acting abilities means the potentially poignant emotional component falls flat and fails to generate any reaction whatsoever, and he seems neutered and held back in the lackluster action sequences.  The ethical dilemmas posed by the premise are paid shallow lip service to string the flimsy narrative together.  Various plot details are unconvincing–I don’t think a retinal scan can give you a “picture” of someone’s brain with completely intact memories and personality, for example–and the “sci-fi” doesn’t hold up to even the most cursory of scrutiny.  Like most generic action flicks, the good guys only succeed because the bad guys are ridiculously incompetent.  Also, the fact that anyone can be cloned in seemingly five minutes flat, with the genius Dr. Weir firing up a “blank” (an adult-sized embryo), adding DNA from the original, and then implanting memories from the retinal scan (this is all about as flimsy as it sounds), makes all the action seem rather pointless when any killed-off bad guy can be brought back from the dead willy nilly (actually, the frequency with which Drucker’s bumbling henchmen keep getting cloned after being killed off by Adam is a mildly amusing running joke).  There is one relatively daring and unexpected plot twist, but the movie squanders this by chickening out of exploring the tragic vein this opens up and copping out with an unlikely neat and happy ending (just compare it to the hard-hitting, ruthlessly logical climax of the far superior sci-fi action thriller Looper).

This is not one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s finer moments.  Schwarzenegger seems hamstrung by the script trying to go in two directions at once, saddling him with a character whose potential tragic and poignant circumstances are far beyond what Schwarzenegger is capable of conveying, and generic action sequences that don’t even give him a chance to do any decent buttkicking.  The movie simultaneously doesn’t let Schwarzenegger kick enough ass, and requires him to act beyond what he’s capable of, with the result that he’s as bland as the movie around him.  Even a couple Schwarzenegger-esque one-liners are lame.  I’m not a Schwarzenegger fan (besides The Terminator, where James Cameron found a way to use him perfectly), but at least in his “better” (relatively speaking) roles, he has a measure of panache that’s sorely lacking here.  No one else, even better actors than Schwarzenegger, is impressive either.  Based on Ghost, one might think Tony Goldwyn is well-cast as a weaselly villain, but his low-key, underplayed Drucker is terminally bland and not very threatening.  His goon squad isn’t any better; Michael Rooker, Sarah Wynter, Terry Crews, and the particularly annoying Rodney Rowland run around being about the most bumbling and ineffectual group of henchmen one is likely to find in a “serious” action movie (Joe Pesci in Home Alone is arguably smarter than these guys).  Among various other plot points that are hard to swallow, I don’t think I buy that ruthless businessman Drucker would keep throwing money around on cloning henchmen this useless.  Surely the richest man in the world can afford some new hires.  Michael Rapaport is the token mildly annoying best friend, and Wendy Crewson  and Taylor Anne Reid are the generic wife and daughter who, of course, end up being held hostage in the villain’s headquarters.  And then there is Robert Duvall, whose Dr. Weir, a sympathetic kinda-sorta-not-really-villain with tragic motives involving his beloved dying wife (Wanda Cannon), feels out of place.  His scenes with his wife are the only moments that have any emotional effect, mostly because Duvall is a better actor than Schwarzenegger.  In fact, the strange case could be made that Duvall is too good, to the point where he seems like he’s in a completely different movie from everyone else.

The Sixth Day runs too long, with too much unnecessarily drawn-out exposition and “dramatic” scenes that fall flat (thanks to filling this material with an “actor”—a term I use loosely—as limited and one-note as Schwarzenegger) and no genuine excitement.  Audiences don’t go to Schwarzenegger movies to watch him monotone through “dramatic” scenes, they buy their tickets to see him kick ass and kill bad guys, which he does here, but without much panache, and the bad guys just aren’t nasty enough to muster any enthusiasm about their inevitable (and anti-climactically drawn-out) comeuppance.  With a different lead actor and a different behind-the-scenes crew, it’s possible to see how an entirely different, far better, morally ambiguous and thought-provoking thriller could be made from the same basic premise, but it’s never paid more than shallow lip service here.  It’s not worth waiting for a sixth day this uneventful.

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