The 6th Day [Blu-ray Disc]

Introduction

Arnie, Arn, the Big Man, The Austrian Oak, Schwartzy or simply The Governator, whatever you want to call Arnold Schwarzenegger, there's no denying that in terms of his acting (air quotes) his best was far, far behind him by the time he was hilariously voted onto the Governor's seat in California. Between 1984 and 1991, or from The Terminator to Terminator 2: Judgement Day, was the golden age of Arnie, cinema's finest action hero. Sadly, outside of those precious years which housed such splendid wham-bam! Arnie vehicles as Commando (1985), Predator (1987) and Total Recall (1990), the only film which even bears mention was his third teaming - and first outside the Terminator franchise - with James Cameron for 1994's OTT extravaganza True Lies, which hinted at a return to form for the Big Man, but turned out to be nothing more than a false labour. But before he would hang up his bulging biceps and overly-familiar buttocks for good - traded in against a surprisingly healthy career in politics, Schwarzenegger would torture us with a run of risible movies - from Eraser in 1995 through to Collateral Damage in 2002, before shamefully lampooning his Terminator character in Jonathan Mostow's awful 2003 attempt to continue Jim Cameron's franchise.


After what would be arguably his career lowpoint in millennial drivel End of Days (1999), Arnie took on the role of Adam Gibson in The 6th Day (2000), a modestly topical, sci-fi (ish) popcorn fest in which he conjures memories of his turn as Quaid in Verhoeven's Total Recall as once again he slips his big muscular feet into the shoes of the everyman on the run from a near-future mega-corp, this time by virtue of being cloned at the wrong place and the wrong time. In a future where human cloning - formerly a political hot potato and now outright banned - is commonplace, Gibson returns home to find he's been illegally cloned, and sadly for him, said clone seems to have settled into his family life nicely. Gibson then finds himself on the run from assassins working for those responsible, who find the idea of killing the original much less of a headache than storming in the Gibson household and shooting the clone at the breakfast table.


Allusions to Total Recall soon disappear as it becomes clear The 6th Day is not a great film by any stretch. Arnie-the-American-everyman rarely works; his frame, accent and screen presence requiring a severe suspension of disbelief to picture him as anything but an arse-kicking, cigar-chewing, door-shattering commando-type of some sort. It worked in Recall because the illegitimacy of Arnie-the-American-everyman was part of the plot which dealt with false memory. In The 6th Day, Arnie is just another Soccer Mom caught up in a whirlwind outwith his control. And unsurprisingly, it doesn't work. The script never has any kind of verve behind it and will reveal its ultimate intentions early on to anyone paying attention, and his screen companions, including Michaels Rappaport and Rooker, seem to be downplaying their own thespian abilities as if to not to embarrass you-know-who, who, to be fair, by the turn of the century was really starting to look his age and here, looks like a creaky old man who can't really be bothered.


There are some nice touches here and there, and the idea of reoccurring villains who don't get bested and return stronger, but killed and cloned, is quite a tickler, but it's hard to come up with a list of positives when your mind keeps coming back to the pretty awful CGI which,as you'd expect, is done no real favours in Hi-Def.

Audio/Video

Not quite old enough to go down in flames with most unrestored catalogue Blu-ray releases, The 6th Day's eight year vintage means it scrubs up nicely with the resolution bump, but there's enough grain and poor contrast issues to make you wonder "why bother?". As much as we all like to read in-depth reviews of Blu-ray material, outlining every pos and neg and dropping a shedload of technical terminology, it's hard to muster the strength when you have, essentially, the DVD version bumped up to high definition. Objects are sharper, colours appear stronger and there's more depth within scenes; a bog standard catalogue mint. The sound options run to Dolby TrueHD in English, along with the usual host of Dolby Digital 5.1s in a gamut of European languages, along with accompanying subtitles. As with the Bobby Z Blu-ray disc, my lack of TrueHD-compatible equipment leaves me with a spot of downmixing, but again, I was blown away by the sheer clarity of the sound, even in 2.0. My own system did a decent job of steering the action through the soundstage via Pro-Logic II, so there are no complaints from this side.

Bonus Material

Standard EPK guff, beginning with a 15-minute Showtime promo pretending to be a "special" called The Future is Coming, a fairly standard making of under the name On The Sixth Day, some short animatic and storyboard comparisons and previews/trailers/TV spots.

Opinion

It's not among Arnie's worst, but The 6th Day is another piece of throwaway hokum has has little to redeem itself when held against some of the monstrous titles in the mighty Schwarzenegger cannon.