Calm down, AB, Harry here, and I want to tell you... this isn't going to be pretty. Seems like our hip as hell butterfly listening in on this screening, has fluttered out with comments rather unbecoming of a great film... Apparently the BACK TO THE FUTURE 2 Hologram Billboards and Robert Duvall... is about all that's good. Of course... you have to ask yourself... is Trent Swinger an Arnie fan? In that holds the true value of his review... Here ya go....
Listen up, babies...Daddy's back in town, though he won't be staying long if he has to sit through any more crap like "The 6th Day." I'm too money to litter these thoughts with spoilers, so here's the generality strewn review:
Very, very cool near-future stuff...from how technology has souped-up pro-football to the use of multi-story holograms in the place of billboards. Oh, and it's nice to see Bob Duvall in anything. There: two positives. And that's pretty much it. Don't let it be said that Daddy starts with anything but the silver lining.
Here's the big-ass cloud:
Of course, while it IS great to see Brando's consigliari, it's sad to think that he needed the paycheck bad enough that he clearly didn't read the script. If he had, he'd have seen a mediocre cloning story, with most of the dialogue cloned from the lesser programs on the Sci-Fi channel. (The rest was clearly ripped-off from "Touched By An Angel"...just watch Arnie's WARM and TOUCHING - capitals mine, and the movie's - scenes with wifey and daughter.)
Early on, it became clear to Daddy that the Schwarzenator wants to soften the relentless tough guy image...actually, it's not that I was that observant, it's just that the movie hammers home the sappy-crappy-cutesy Arnie for a good twenty minutes, even as it's being obvious about what will happen to the Bavarian marshmallow. (There's a BIG REVELATION in the third reel that even the slowest, dimmest one among you will see from about fifteen miles off. And no, it isn't that he's really been dead the whole time. Can't say the same for the director, though...)
See, here's the thing: You wanna know the plot, and you think that I'm erring on the side of being spoiler-free by not giving it to you. You're wrong. I'll give you the plot...Arnie's been cloned, and now the people who did are trying to kill him, because cloning is illegal. You knew that from the trailer. THERE IS NOTHING ELSE TO TELL YOU. The explanations for the cloning, and for the bad guys, are so lazy they're almost not there. Motivations are sketched in, but they're nonsense, babies, nonsense.
There's an interesting question that COULD be raised, given the fact that the bad guys' henchmen - okay, henchman and hench-beautiful-baby - keep getting offed and being insta-cloned. That question is about how they would stand for that, knowing their individual consciousness ends each time they die, even if their memories are inserted into a new bodily vessel. See? I messed up, and used words and had thoughts that the empty-headed buffoons who made "The 6th Day" couldn't begin to appreciate.
You, my friends, are gonna see this movie, no matter what I say...and you're gonna want "Total Recall" but you're not even gonna get "Eraser." You're gonna say 'what the hell was my man Trent talking about?' for the first half hour...you're gonna spend the next hour saying 'oh, well, he was talking about THAT'...and then you're gonna spend the last half hour saying that Daddy was too damned kind. By the time Arnie starts punctuating each killing with a desperately-trying-to-be-funny tough-guy line, you'll be ready to settle for - hell - "Twins."
But enough with the bad news...the good news is that Daddy's goin' to Vegas...they're gonna give me the "Rain Man" suite...
Stay money, babies,
Trent Swinger
