"Batman and Robin" and "End of Days" both flopped at the box office, so there's a lot riding on Arnold Schwarzenegger's latest attempt to reclaim his action-man crown. But while this futuristic cloning thriller sets out to replicate the testosterone-fuelled mayhem of such Arnie classics as "Predator" and "Commando", "The 6th Day" suggests the big man's days at the top of the Hollywood tree are well and truly numbered.
Directed in a typically workmanlike fashion by Roger Spottiswoode, the film casts Arnold as Adam Gibson, a loving husband and father whose life is turned upside down when he returns home from work one day to find an exact replica filling his shoes.
What Adam doesn't know is that he's the unwitting pawn in a cover-up involving millionaire businessman Michael Drucker (Tony Goldwyn), who runs an illegal cloning operation with the help of scientist Graham Weir (Robert Duvall).
Chased from pillar to post by Drucker's henchmen, who are immediately replaced by identical clones every time he dispatches them, Adam must get to the bottom of the mystery before he's erased by the bad guys. Unfortunately, with not one but two Arnolds stacked up against them, the bad guys never stand a chance.
Though set in a troublingly plausible world where everyone from professional football players to hired assassins can be duplicated in a matter of hours, "The 6th Day" quickly degenerates into a by-the-numbers slice of SF hokum, with an 11th-hour twist so obvious you wonder why the writers bothered.
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