California, Clayson Benally, Day6, Jaeseok Hwang, Jeneda Benally, movies, music, musicals, reviews, Ryan Barrier, Sihasin, South Korea, Sungjin, Wonpil, Yoo Seok Jong, Young K
August 30, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Yoo Seok Jong and Jaeseok Hwang
Korean and English with subtitles
Culture Representation: Taking place in California, the musical film “6Days” features a racially diverse cast of characters (Asian, white, Native American, African American and Latin) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: K-pop rock band Day6 goes on a six-day road trip to celebrate the band’s 10th anniversary, while performing songs and meeting various people along the way.
Culture Audience: “6Days” will appeal primarily to Day6 fans and people who don’t mind watching a boring music-video-styled film.
The dreadfully dull “6Days” is a “road trip” vanity project for the pop/rock band Day6. This film flop is so generic and limp, no one should pay money to see this so-called docudrama, which is really an uncreative compilation of staged music videos. “6Days” was originally released in theaters. Anyone except Day 6’s die-hard fans will probably feel cheated if any time or money is spent watching “6 Days,” which should’ve been released on the Internet for free.
Directed by Yoo Seok Jong and Jaeseok Hwang, “6Days” is supposed to be a chronicle of a “spontaneous” six-day road trip taken by the four members of 6Days, to celebrate the band’s 10th anniversary. There’s nothing “spontaneous” about “6Days,” which is filled with boring dialogue, terrible acting and extremely hokey contrived scenarios. “6Days” did not have to be decadent to be exciting. It just had to be interesting, but it fails to be interesting on almost every level.
The four members of Day6—singer/guitarist Sungjin, bass player/singer Young K, keyboardist Wonpil and drummer Dowoon—are shown in one of three scenarios in the movie:
- Riding in a truck driven by Sungjin and having forgettable and mundane conversations.
- Getting themselves into situations that are supposed to be outside of the band’s “comfort zone.”
- Meeting people who put the band in a situation to perform Day6 songs
The road trip takes place in California, with most of the footage filmed in the desert area of California’s Imperial County. In the alternative community known as Slab City, the Day6 band members marvel at the eccentric misfits and industrial artwork. The famous tourist attraction Salvation Mountain is also featured in “6Days.”
The band is seen performing usually in locations (such as on a desert cliff) where there’s no place to plug in the electrical instruments that they’re fake-playing for the cameras. Toward the end of the movie, the band ends up on an unnamed beach. This movie has a weird fixation on showing the band members in locations where there’s a lot of sand.
The conversations that the Day6 members have in the movie are almost painfully lackluster and corny. At one point Young K says while inside the truck, “Everything I see becomes music,” just minutes before the band is shown in yet another music video-styled performance. The performances in the movie aren’t really live. They’re lip synced to the original recordings.
While in Imperial County, the band members help a truck that’s stuck in the dirt on the road. The truck is occupied by Clayson Benally and his sister Jeneda Benally (playing versions of themselves) of the musical duo Sihasin. The Benally siblings invite Day6 to their ramshackle desert home, where Clayson and Jeneda show Day6 some of their Navajo tribe musical traditions. The interactions look very forced and awkward.
Later, a middle-aged guy named Dave (played by Ryan Barrier), who says he’s an event promoter (but he looks like a stereotypical used car salesman), just happens to be in a remote part of the desert at the same time as Day6. When Dave finds out that these four guys are in a band, he invites the band to a show that he’s promoting at a place called Junk Sculpture (which is really just a junkyard with a stage), with an audience of less than 20 people.
The performers at this show are awful. And so what does Dave do? He invites Day6 to perform on stage. And, of course, the stage just happens to be already set up with the musical equipment that the band needs. It should also come as no surprise that the band gets an enthusiastic response from the audience.
After this phony-looking concert, Dave allows the band members to drive his dune buggy. And so, there’s a tedious chunk of time showing the band members (or their stunt doubles) doing daredevil dune buggy riding in the desert sand. Some of the movie’s cinematography is pretty good, but “6Days” has a lack of imagination and creativity everywhere else.
After saying goodbye to Dave, one of the most cliché things that could happen in a road trip movie happens to Day6: The band’s truck gets stolen. And you just know that hitchhiking scene is going to happen, to show how “cute” it is for the four band members to stick out their hitchhiker thumbs at the same time on a deserted road.
The 81-minute “6Days” is obviously a promotional showcase for Day6’s music. But for a feature-length song-oriented film, “6Days” doesn’t have as many songs as it could’ve had. The movie’s song soundtrack (consisting of only Day6 songs) has only 10 songs: “Welcome to the Show,” “You Were Beautiful,” “I’m Serious,” “Melt Down,” “Congratulations” (Final Version), “Time of Our Life,” “Letting Go” (Rebooted Version), “Happy,” “When You Love Someone” and “Dream Rider.”
If the band members had undeniable charisma, it would make up for all the other nonsense in “6Days.” Although they seem like nice guys, the Day6 band members’ personalities are as bland as bland can be. Unless you’re a huge fan of Day6, you won’t be able to remember much about what sets one band member’s personality apart from another. The Beatles had “A Hard Day’s Night,” but Day6 has the embarrassingly lackluster “6Days,” which should be subtitled “A Hard Day6 Blight.”
CJ CGV Holdings released “6Days” in select U.S. cinemas on August 28, 2025.