The 6th Day: Movie, DVD, Blu-ray Review (2008)

The second man

Directed by Roger Spottiswoode, written by Cormac Wibberley and Marianne Wibberley, 124 minutes, PG-13.

In this futuristic thriller about human cloning, Arnold Schwarzenegger is Adam Gibson, a family man who lives in a world where parents regularly clone their children’s dead pets so nobody ever has to suffer the hardship of finding Fluffy doubling as a hassock in the living room.

But when Gibson returns home one evening to find a clone of himself seated at the dinner table with his family, it becomes clear that this whole cloning business has gotten out of hand. Now under siege by a bunch of clone-happy operatives led by Tony Goldwyn and Robert Duvall, Gibson predictably hits the road running in an effort to stay alive while trying to find out why he was targeted for cloning.

Cormac and Marianne Wibberley’s script distills the ethical and moral issues surrounding human cloning into neat soundbites, some of which are intentionally funny, but most of which, in their amusing effort to be profound, only manage to bear the combined intellectual weight of the Doublemint twins.

Not that anyone will be renting this film to decide whether it’s morally right to resurrect grandpa from the grave. They’ll be expecting action, which “The 6th Day” has, but it’s never as thrilling or as ingeniously conceived as the action scenes in Schwarzenegger’s best films, “The Terminator” and “Terminator 2.”

Indeed, a good part of “The 6th Day” is so caught up in ethics, it forgets it’s supposed to be an action film. Throughout much of it, audiences might be better off closing their eyes and counting the offspring of Dolly the sheep.

Grade: C+