Mark Harrison | On 01, May 2023

Director: James Cameron
Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, Bill Paxton, Tia Carrere, Art Malik
Certificate: 15

“When he said I do, he never said what he did.” True Lies is just one of a recent rash of movies to be adapted into a streaming TV series, starring Steve Howey and Ginger Gonzaga as a married couple who get into international espionage when it emerges he’s been leading a double life as a spy for the US government. Also streaming on Disney+ UK is the 1994 movie, a film that’s more Arnold Schwarzenegger than James Cameron.

Inspired by the French comedy La Totale!, True Lies casts Schwarzenegger as a James Bond-alike operative for the covert agency Omega Sector. His home life is dependent on his wife, Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), and daughter, Dana (Eliza Dushku), believing he’s a dull software salesman – but his frequent business trips cover for his missions with twice-divorced colleague, Gib (Tom Arnold).

While tracking art dealer Juno Skinner (Tia Carrere) and terrorist kingpin Salim Abu Aziz (Art Malik), Harry and Gib discover that Helen is considering an affair with used car salesman Simon (Bill Paxton) – who is, ironically enough, pretending to be a spy. Naturally, he diverts government resources to investigate his own wife, but his long-held cover won’t hold up to this most personal of missions.

Almost all James Cameron films are love stories. While True Lies is ostensibly about marriage, it’s also his least personal film, strangely bereft of the usual romance that defines his sensational storytelling, because it’s more or less a favour to his frequent collaborator Schwarzenegger. The maximalist action extravaganza is in Cameron’s wheelhouse, but this remains – at the time of writing – his only foray into comedy.

In the 2010 biography The Futurist: The Life And Films Of James Cameron, the director says: “I saw the film as an Anti-James Bond, a reality check on the uber-male fantasy… Bond himself is a pathetic eternal bachelor who will never know the truth of what it is to be a man, to be a husband and father, which is why that fantasy works… because Bond has nobody to answer to.”

When True Lies came out, James Bond’s return in GoldenEye and Tom Cruise’s reboot of Mission: Impossible were yet to come along and revive the spy blockbuster, so this broad spoof has a clear playing field. Indeed, 007 had been tied up in legalities after 1989’s Licence to Kill and, despite Schwarzenegger’s forays into comedy, he was still the reigning champion of the uber-male fantasy.

This should make him perfect casting, except that it’s more a Schwarzenegger movie than a Cameron one, and it often combines the weakest parts of both. While the star has always been a better actor than he gets credit for, the novelty of watching him do Roger Moore-style savoir faire wears off quicker than a Cameron-length movie can sustain.

Whatever Cameron’s thoughts about the spy movie genre, both he and Schwarzenegger have plenty of indulgent fun playing in that sandbox for the first hour, with swanky dinner do interludes and Charlton Heston’s cameo as an eyepatch-wearing intelligence bod. Telling though it is that the director’s only major reference to any of the 007 movies is the snowy downhill chase from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (the last time Bond was married), there are interludes like the action sequence featuring a horse in an elevator that wouldn’t have been out of place in a more ambitious Roger Moore outing.

However, the first half is also peppered with the movie’s other Arnold, Tom Arnold, and Gib’s incessant misogynistic stand-up routine. For all its deconstructive intentions, the unchecked macho-ness of this movie is more proto-Michael Bay than Cameron, and even the late, great Bill Paxton, who plays his conniving creep with a bit more self-awareness, comes off worse in Cameron’s uncharacteristically nasty script.

The problem isn’t that the film has aged poorly, but that it’s never unsympathetic towards its men behaving badly, and the fix, for someone who has centred female characters in every other movie he’s ever directed, should have been comically obvious at the scripting stage.

You don’t even have to go as far as gender-flipping the French original, which you could imagine Cameron doing well, but Helen’s perspective is never foregrounded in the way it should be. No matter how long we spend watching Tom Arnold spout nonsense, Jamie Lee Curtis is Schwarzenegger’s real double-act partner here and it’s well over an hour in before she really gets much to do.

She seizes control of the film during the icky moment of Harry and Gib subjecting Helen to a good old-fashioned rendition – Curtis plays it terrified at first, but quickly turns it back on her unseen tormentors. Typically, in the very next sequence, Harry tricks her into a striptease, but this iconic scene is a turning point precisely because Curtis commands the role with equal parts comic timing and sex appeal. From there to the end, she’s the standout performer.

To be fair, the film never drags, but once you know it’s going to get better on repeat viewings, that first half looks so much baggier by comparison. It all serves to set up Malik and Carrere as villains for the finale, but once the high concept actually kicks in and Helen gets more involved, there comes a light-footedness that makes the ensuing carnage funnier and more entertaining all round.

The Schwarzenegger of it all reasserts itself in the outrageous finale but then, as mentioned, True Lies is more him than Cameron. It was a risk for both of them, as the first movie with a $100m budget, but it was a massive hit, finishing third in 1994’s worldwide box-office rankings behind only Forrest Gump and The Lion King. But it’s not for nothing that it was the star’s last smash-hit hurrah for the 1990s either.

Last Action Hero had bombed the year before and a string of flops and family comedies awaited. In the late 1990s, both Arnolds were collaborating with Cameron on a potential sequel but, after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the director judged that terrorism was no longer a suitable subject for an action comedy.

Looking back, it’s less a deconstruction of James Bond than a feature-length precursor to American Dad!, a show very much of the war-on-terror era, which gets its comedy out of CIA agent Stan Smith openly abusing his power to mess with his family. True Lies is still several degrees wide of that level of absurdity. At its best when channelling Cameron’s disdain for the genre rather than indulging it, it’s dazzling in places, but it’s arguably the filmmaker’s weakest film to date – whatever you think of the others, at least he means everything he says in them.

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