One of Arnold Schwarzenegger's last hurrahs as an action film icon, The 6th Day is a reasonably entertaining blend of science fiction thrills and macho action chills that serves as a decent time killer... but nothing more.

Set in the near future, Schwarzenegger plays Adam Gibson, the owner of an Extreme Sports charter company. He and his partner, Hank (Michael Rapaport), fly rich snowboarder types up into the mountains using their high-tech helicopters. When they're not flying around, Arnold is hanging out with his wife (Wendy Crewson) and daughter (Taylor Anne Reid while Hank enjoys making sweet love to his virtual girlfriend (Jennifer Gareis) and hanging out with his cat. Hank and Adam decide to swap shifts one day meaning that Hank will fly rich industrialist Michael Drucker (Tony Goldwyn) up into the mountains while Adam celebrates his birthday, but an anti-cloning fundamentalist attacks Hank and Drucker and screws everything up.

While Hank is getting shot, Adam is at the mall debating whether or not he should pay Re-Pet to clone his recently deceased dog, Oliver. Adam's pretty old fashioned and he doesn't really like the idea of cloning much. That all starts to change, however, when Adam comes home one night and finds an exact duplicate of himself hanging out in his home, playing with his daughter, smoking his cigars and getting it on with his wife in the mini van. Adam's investigation soon uncovers a conspiracy involving Drucker and a Doctor Weir (Robert Duvall) who happens to specialize in illegal human cloning techniques. Meanwhile, a gang of Drucker's cronies, lead by Robert Marshall (Michael Rooker), are out to make sure that Adam doesn't uncover too much about the operation and to keep him silent no matter what the cost.

Borrowing a little bit from The Terminator (at one point Arnold tells a character 'I might be back') and Total Recall but coming nowhere near the success of those two films, The 6th Day is Arnold-lite. While there are fights, shoot outs and explosions aplenty, the violence in the film is pretty sanitized (hence the film's PG-13 rating) and devoid of any real impact. The film moves along at a brisk pace but it winds up being pretty predictable and as such, it's lacking in tension or suspense. This is simply Schwarzenegger going through the motions and The 6th Day is about as formulaic as it gets. The film wants to be intelligent with it's pokes and prods at the moral debate surrounding human cloning but instead opts for the low brow 'let's blow everything up and throw in some witty dialogue' approach that you'd expect from a by-the-numbers action film. This would be fine if we had memorable characters to believe in but the filmmakers can't even give us that much and there's no chemistry between the good guys (Rapaport and Schwarzenegger just seem awkward) nor are there any memorable bad guys for them to fight. Goldwyn does nothing to make the role his own and while Duvall is decent in his part, he's not given very much to do with it.

Director Roger Spottiswoode ensures that the film looks good and that it moves along nicely enough but the film winds up as little more than a moderately entertaining if uninspired time killer. It's worth a watch on a rainy day when you've got nothing better to do even if everyone involved seems to have phoned it in.

Video:

The 6th Day is presented in a decent 2.40.1 1080p anamorphic widescreen presentation courtesy of some spiffy AVC/MPEG 4 encoding. Overall, this image on this DVD is pretty solid. Detail is strong throughout and there aren't any problems with dirt or print damage to complain about. Skin tones look very realistic and black levels stay strong throughout. There aren't any problems with mpeg compression artifacts or edge enhancement to complain about though some scenes look a little too sharp for their own good. Overall this is a very clean and clear image without any major flaws or problems. A little bit of grain is obvious in some scenes but it isn't distracting though some of the CGI work in the film looks dated by today's standards and the enhanced clarity of the picture serves to bring that out more than a standard definition DVD would. All in all, however, fans of the film should be pretty happy with the way that film has been treated on this DVD.