True Lies (1994)
DIRECTOR: James Cameron
CAST: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, Bill Paxton, Art Malik, Tia Carrere, Grant Heslov, Charlton Heston
REVIEW:
True Lies, the third collaboration between James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger, continues to showcase Cameron as a skillful filmmaker, but this time he’s done something a little different, blending grandiose action with comedy without feeling tonally schizophrenic. The injection of a high comedy quotient means True Lies‘ over-the-top action sequences don’t reach the edge-of-your seat tension of some in both Terminator installments, but it’s still a rollicking good time that both serves up plenty of action and makes us laugh.
The opening sequence feels like a pseudo-Bond movie, as top-secret agent Harry Tasker (Arnold Schwarzenegger) infiltrates a ball in a Swiss chateau to steal encrypted files with the help of his sidekicks (Tom Arnold, Grant Heslov). After this, he returns to his suburban family life of domestic tranquility (i.e. boredom) with his oft-neglected wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), a mousy legal secretary, and rebellious teenage daughter—do movies have any other kind?—Dana (Eliza Dushku), who (of course) think he’s a dull computer salesman. But Harry soon gets drawn into thwarting a plot involving antiques dealer Juno Skinner (Tia Carrere), who’s helping fanatical terrorist Salim Abu Aziz (Art Malik) smuggle four nuclear warheads into the United States. And things get taken on a detour when Harry stumbles across a phone conversation that makes him believe his wife is having an affair.
On paper, the plot of True Lies is generic. The villainous scheme Harry and company must thwart is your generic “nuclear weapon terrorist attack”, and our band of villains are your standard-issue thinly-developed and stereotypical Middle Eastern terrorists. In fact, the most enjoyable (or at least most hilarious) section of the movie is when it basically forgets about the villains for a while and goes on a lengthy detour with Harry sniffing out his wife’s “lover”—a used car salesman who calls himself “Simon” (Bill Paxton) and is posing as an international secret agent as a convoluted seduction scheme—and cheerfully misappropriating national security resources to do it. When we eventually surrender to eleventh hour convention with a generic race against time against the terrorists detonating their nuclear device, True Lies slips mostly into a formulaic action movie, albeit a competently-executed one, with lots of generic shootouts and stuff blowing up and a race on a bridge, although Cameron directs with flair and panache. How cheerfully over-the-top does some of the action get? An early bit involves Arnold Schwarzenegger on horseback chasing a fleeing villain on a motorcycle through a hotel lobby and up elevators and onto the roof where Schwarzenegger attempts to charge the horse straight off the roof into the swimming pool of a nearby building (the horse isn’t onboard with this plan). And that’s a long time before we get to Schwarzenegger, his kidnapped daughter, and a bad guy all clinging and fighting on top of a Harrier fighter jet in midair, and the action-comedy punchline comes when a bad guy ends up dangling from one of the missiles, which Schwarzenegger proceeds to fire straight into a helicopter carrying a batch of other bad guys (complete with the obligatory deadpan Schwarzenegger one-liner, “you’re fired”). The scene some male viewers will undoubtedly remember better than the action, though, is Jamie Lee Curtis doing a sexy striptease that’s possibly the hottest thing she’s ever done. It’s a testament to True Lies‘ entertainment value and skillful execution that it’s as enjoyable as it is even with a threadbare generic “main” plot that basically serves to provide a few action sequences. The last two times he worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger (in the first two Terminator movies), James Cameron showed he could craft adrenaline-pumping action sequences. Here, he shows a knack for blending over-the-top action with a flair for comedy without tipping the scales too far in either direction to unbalance the other. True Lies isn’t a 100% comedy, but it never takes itself too seriously either.
In general, I wouldn’t consider myself a particular Arnold Schwarzenegger fan, but True Lies is one of his best roles outside of The Terminator (probably not coincidentally, he is reunited with James Cameron, who seems to have a knack for using Schwarzenegger to his best advantage), allowing him to display both his aptitudes for butt-kicking and deadpan humor. Jamie Lee Curtis gets a juicy role here too; rarely does an actress get the chance to be mousy, klutzy, and sexy all in the same movie and sometimes in the same scene. Tom Arnold is an enjoyable comic relief sidekick and plays surprisingly well off of Schwarzenegger in a buddy movie-style give-and-take chemistry. Alas, while Tia Carrere seems to be enjoying herself as the slinky femme fatale, Art Malik is a one-note and generic wild-eyed terrorist who exists solely as a plot device to drive the equally generic “main” plot and is arguably the least memorable person in the movie (fortunately, the rest of True Lies is enjoyable enough to succeed even with a weak nothing villain). In fact, the standout in the supporting cast is Cameron regular Bill Paxton, who’s hilarious as Harry’s fake “romantic rival”. In smaller roles we have Grant Heslov supplying a little comic relief as Sidekick #2, and Charlton Heston in a glorified cameo.
True Lies runs about twenty minutes too long (it’s hard for any action movie, even a good one, to sustain momentum over a two hour and twenty minute runtime, especially with a fairly threadbare plot), but it combines over-the-top action with comedy while maintaining a balanced quotient of both. It might not equal the previous Cameron-Schwarzenegger collaboration of The Terminator franchise, but it’s still a rollicking good ride.
* * *