TRUE LIES

(July 1994, U.S.)

I've loved all of James Cameron's theatrical motion pictures since THE TERMINATOR (1984), and I love TRUE LIES, too. It's action-packed, exciting, and funny, to boot. Yet somehow it's the most easily forgettable of all his work. Perhaps it's because it was sandwiched like a filler movie in between two of his biggest hits, TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991) and TITANIC (1997). Perhaps it's because of its overly-humorous tone premise among a body of work that's usually anything but funny. Who knows?


Arnold Schwarzenegger returns for the third time with Cameron to play Harry Tasker who's leading a double life as both a dull computer salesman to his wife Helen (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) and his daughter Dana and a secret agent for a United States intelligence agency called Omega Sector. With his fellow agent and comic-relief sidekick Albert (played by Tom Arnold), they start off the movie by infiltrating a foreign party of suspected arms dealers and terrorists in Switzerland in a series of action sequence that practically pay homage to the James Bond film GOLDFINGER. The terrorist leader Salim Abu Aziz (played by Art Milik) heads the group known as "Crimson Jihad" intends to hold America hostage with his newly-acquired nuclear missiles. The action that opens the movie soon dissolves itself into the mundane life of Harry and Helen. When Harry shows up unexpectedly at Helen's office to take her to lunch, he overhears her talking on the phone to a mysterious man named Simon. Convinced Helen is having an affair with him, Harry used his Omega resources to discover that Simon is merely a used car salesman pretending to be a covert undercover agent in order to seduce women into bed, and it looks like Helen is his latest target. Disguised, Harry and his participating team kidnap Helen and Simon. Simon is easily scared off, but during interrogation, Helen confesses that due to Harry's absence, she desperately seeks some adventure in her life, thus hooking up with a fraud like Simon. Harry arranges for Helen to participate in a staged spy mission, where she's required to plan a listening device in the phone at a hotel suite, but not before she has to dance in her bra and underwear to seduce a mysterious figure (who is actually her husband himself). This sequence reveals what a sexy woman Jamie Lee Curtis truly is (or was back then)...

Just as the seduction reaches the point where Helen discovers it's actually Harry behind the entire facade, Aziz's men burst into the hotel room and kidnap them to an island in the Florida Keys, where Aziz reveals his smuggled nuclear warheads and threatens to destroy an American city each week unless the U.S. military withdraws from the Persian Gulf. As his first act, he plants one of the warheads on that deserted island to detonate it, showing his seriousness to the U.S. government. Of course, Harry breaks himself and Helen from from their captors and kicks major ass along the way to their freedom. After hanging from a helicopter and rescuing Helen from a speeding limo toward a gap in a destroyed bridge, the island warhead is observed in its detonation in an almost beautiful sight across the water. But back home, Aziz and his men have taken Dana and taken control of a Miami skyscraper under construction. Harry commandeers one of the U.S. fighter planes and arrives on the scene to rescue his daughter and destroy the bad guys once and for all. A year later, the Tasker family are happily reunited and Helen has joined the Omega Sector alongside Harry.

While TRUE LIES won't exactly be remembered as Cameron's or Schwarzenegger's greatest achievement, the film still entertains with enough action and humor to sustain itself. Arnold can be funny when he wants to, and I suppose we've also learned a thing or two about Curtis - not only with her amazing body, but her ability to adapt herself to humorous situation beyond what she did in TRADING PLACES (1983). Bill Paxton as Simon, is as obnoxious as he can be, reminding us of his panic-stricken persona in Cameron's ALIENS (1986). In the end, as I previously stated, TRUE LIES is fun, but doesn't nearly stand up against Cameron's the greater blockbusters of his impressive career.

Favorite line or dialogue:

Albert (about the fake Simon): "I'm startin' to like this guy. We still gotta kill him. That's a given, you know."