If you're going to clone someone against his or her will in a top secret and highly illegal process, make sure it's not Arnold Schwarzenegger.

That, more than anything else, is the moral of the latest Arnold action-fest, The 6th Day.

I don't know why these people continue to mess with Arnold; you'd think they'd learn. Heck, Satan himself couldn't defeat him in End of Days (ill-named when you realize that right after making End of Days, he makes The 6th Day, so I guess it wasn't the End of Days after all)- you think a couple of slack-jawed cloners can bring him down?

The plot in a nutshell: Arnold is cloned, doesn't like that he's cloned, and sets out to kill whoever had him cloned.

Now there are a whole lot of other important issues in this movie: the dangers of cloning, the modernization of our world, Arnold still smoking his stogies, important stuff like that. But it's all beside the point. This movie is about Arnold running around town trying to kill the bad guys.

There are other actors in this movie, I'd even heard of a couple of them. But they are inconsequential to the heart of the matter- Arnold. Arnold grunts, he smiles, he dives, he runs, he swims.

And the world is a better place for it.

There are cool twists. After all, these are cloners, and so Arnold ends up killing the same bad guys over and over. Then you got cloned pets, laser guns, talking dolls, you name it. The movie's futuristic society (which we're told is 'sooner than you think') is full of some neat gadgets. In fact, that, more than anything, is what I'm expecting from the future, lots of cool gadgets.

Sure we got our Palm Pilots, our GPS Locators, our laser pens which are really only useful as cat toys. But I want a refrigerator that tells me I'm low on milk (and then orders some for me). I want remote-controlled Helicopters. And I really want a virtual girlfriend who can't wait to sit down and spend the evening watching all my favorite sports shows that she's taped during the day, while making sure my beer is cold and fresh while she wears a frilly nightgown.

But is the movie any good? Well, the body count is smaller than most Arnold movies. And it's made especially smaller by the fact that he keeps killing the same people, so I'm not sure to count it as three deaths or one. He doesn't have as many standard Arnold one-liners, which is good, because that was getting down right silly.

But the action is non-stop. The pace is excellent. The characters are all you could want in an Arnold movie. This is really on the upper end of the Arnold scale. Maybe not The Terminator, but well above Batman and Robin, End of Days and Jingle All the Way.

I'm giving The 6th Day 3 5/6 Babylons. Sci-Fi fans and Arnold nuts will love it; everyone else will simply enjoy it.

Clones will fear it.

Editor's Note:

Oh how I longed to edit the 4th sentence in the 9th paragraph to read what the SMC was actually thinking:

"And I really want a virtual girlfriend who can't wait to sit down and spend the evening watching all my favorite sports shows that she's taped during the day, while making sure my beer is cold and fresh while she wears a frilly nightgown.

The 6th Day
Rated: PG-13
Directed By: Roger Spottiswoode (the funniest director's name in Hollywood)
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tony Goldwyn, Robert Duvall, Michael Rapaport, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sarah Wynter, Michael Rapaport, Rodney Rowland, Tony Goldwyn, Sarah Wynter, Rodney Rowland, Sarah Wynter and a voice that sounds an awful lot like Jon Stewart but which is probably just some guy who sounds a lot like Jon Stewart, which is a bit of a disappointment.