James Camer-thon: A Review of "True Lies"

"Hello, my name is Aziz. You're probably wondering how I got here."
*Seinfeld theme song*

Happy Friday once again! Super Bowl LVII has concluded, and now we're onto baseball season as we eek through the month of February. Which begs the question... how on Earth do we even have a chance of topping Terminator 2: Judgment Day? This is probably a question that James Cameron posed to himself afterwards. Maybe he's in fact the type of director that laughs off each picture, no matter how dominant and stellar they are at the box office or at the Academy Awards (Terminator 2 won four, and it should have won Best Picture)... so the prospect of taking up another film afterwards and not even being intimidated by it seems like a behavior James Cameron would exercise himself in.

MENTOS: The Freshmaker
(Proud Sponsor of Sleazebag Simon's Used Car Lot)

What we're about to discuss today on this glorious Friday... or shitty Friday depending on where you are in the world and what your life circumstances give you... leading into this weekend is one of James Cameron's more funnier movies. True Lies is adapted from a 1991 French film La Totale!, and tells the story of a husband who tells his family he's a computer salesman when really he's a secret agent for a special undercover task force. While dealing with the threat of a terrorist organization, the "Crimson Jihad", the husband also learns that his wife is having an affair with a used car salesman. Therein lies the comedy of the situation, and it's some of the most dry-wit, excellently delivered one-liners I've ever heard in an action film. Playing the role of the husband is Arnold Schwarzenegger, his first non-Terminator role in a James Cameron movie. The wife is none other than Jamie Lee Curtis, the queen of scream herself. Let's dig into True Lies, and figure out why it's so humorous while still delivering yet another action-packed, kick-ass experience in cinema. This is True Lies... a movie that teaches us that even if you're some beefy hunk secret agent who has the most badass job on the planet... if you still don't show your wife enough affection, she'll honestly consider dumping you for a wormy, weasily man who's lesser than you... at least for a little excitement, anyway.

"Ope, pardon me. I was looking for the suite
that Donald Trump was staying in."

Harry Tasker (Arnold Schwarzenegger) leads a double life: to his legal secretary wife, Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), and his rebellious daughter Dana (Eliza Dushku), he is a boring computer salesman often away on business trips, but in actuality, he is a secret agent for Omega Sector, a top-secret U.S. counterterrorism agency. It's even led by Nick Fury... that is, Nick Fury if it was cast in the 1990s... Spencer Trilby, played by Charlton Heston. Harry, along with his teammates Albert "Gib" Gibson (Tom... Arnold, of all people) and Faisil (Grant Heslov), infiltrate a party in Switzerland hosted by billionaire Jamal Khaled (Marshall Manesh), whom everyone may remember as "Ranjit" from How I Met Your Mother, the sitcom with all the build up and none of the payoff. LOL. Anywho, this is where Harry meets drop-dead gorgeous art dealer Juno Skinner (Tia "She Will Be Mine" Carrere). Eventually they learn that Juno is not only Khaled's art dealer, but that she is being paid by an Islamic terrorism group called "Crimson Jihad", led by Salim Abu Aziz (Art Malik). Harry visits her undercover as a potential buyer to learn more, leading Aziz and his men to attempt to kill him. Harry fights them off, but loses Aziz in pursuit. As a result, he misses the birthday party that Helen and Dana had planned for him. It was also the scene with a classic Arnold pun, slamming a dude's head in a urinal and telling him to cool off. It was also also the scene where Arnold tries to jump a horse off a skyscraper. Thankfully, James Cameron wrote the horse to refuse and throw Arnold over the side. We didn't get that crazy.

"I can't see shit without my contact lenses, but
I sure hope I'm not firing at a skyscraper."

Harry goes to Helen's office the next day to smooth matters over and surprise her for lunch, but overhears her making secret arrangements to meet a man named Simon (Bill Paxton, who much like Arnold is in his third James Cameron collaboration). Suspecting Helen is having an affair, he uses Omega Sector resources to learn that Simon is a used car salesman who pretends to be a covert agent to seduce women. In disguise, Harry and other Omega agents kidnap Helen and Simon. After terrifying Simon into keeping away from Helen, Harry and Gib interrogate Helen using a voice masking device and learn that she is desperately seeking adventure because of Harry's constant absences. Harry thus arranges for Helen to participate in a staged spy mission, where she is to seduce a mysterious figure (who is actually Harry himself) and plant a bug in his hotel room. After one of the most energizing and empowering dance sequences... Aziz's men suddenly burst in, kidnap the couple, and take them to an island in the Florida Keys for interrogation.

On the island, Harry's suspicions about Juno are confirmed: Crimson Jihad paid her to help them smuggle four stolen MIRV nuclear warheads into the country by hiding them in priceless antique statues. Aziz demands that the United States remove all U.S. military forces from the Persian Gulf forever or else he will detonate a warhead each week in a major U.S. city. He also says he will detonate one warhead on the uninhabited island to demonstrate that Crimson Jihad is a nuclear power. Before he and Helen are tortured, Harry is administered a truth serum and confesses his double life to Helen, in a rather humorous manner mind you. That's the thing, a lot of parts in this movie would be tense and uncomfortable in any other movie... but in this one they come off quirky, or awkward, or just downright cheesy. You'd think the comedy wouldn't mix well... but it totally does. After a ridiculously cool, yet again, cheesy shoot out, they escape to watch as one warhead is set to explode in ninety minutes and the others are loaded onto vehicles to be taken into the U.S. via the Overseas Highway, thus bypassing U.S. Customs. Harry and Helen get separated in the ensuing melee where Harry kills most of the terrorists, but Aziz gets away with one of the warheads. Helen is caught by Juno and taken in a limousine following the convoy. Gib and other Omega agents pick up Harry and they use two Marine Harrier jump jets to intercept the convoy by destroying part of the Seven Mile Bridge. Harry rescues Helen from Juno's limo before it goes off the Highway and topples into the water. It's a wild chase scene, and again has comedy elements mixed in, such as the pelican landing on the hood of the van that then pulls three Crimson Jihad gunmen into an explosive death in the sea. Plus... the Harrier Jets play a key role in this movie's finale, but also watching them blow up sections of the bridge and watching the limo NARROWLY miss each missile? Awesome, just stunning action work.

"Helen, will you marry me?"
"Harry, that's a grenade, not a ring!"
"It's because you make my heart burst with love."
"Oh gag, Harry."

The warhead left on the island detonates in front of the public without killing anyone. Gib tells Harry that Aziz and his men are holding Dana hostage in a downtown Miami skyscraper and are threatening to detonate their last warhead. Harry commandeers one of the Harriers to rescue his daughter, resulting in a hell of an upcoming action sequence. Faisil gets into the building by posing as part of a news team requested by Aziz. When Faisil guns down several of Aziz's men, (I call it "Faisil getting his groove back") Dana steals the missile control key and flees to the building's roof, eventually climbing a tower crane and threatening to drop the key to the street. Aziz pursues and nearly catches her before Harry arrives. Harry rescues a shocked Dana, after the young lady FALLS on a FLYING HARRIER JET... and after a tense struggle with Aziz, he eventually has him ensnared on the end of one of the plane's missiles. In easily one of the most fun, wild, stand-up-and-cheer celebratory, awesome action movie moments in history... Harry fires the missile carrying the ensnared Aziz at a terrorist helicopter. The missile sails through a whole in a building to the other side into a helicopter carrying remnants of the Crimson Jihad... killing Aziz and the last of the terrorist organization. Harry, Helen, and Dana are then safely reunited by Omega Sector.

One year later, Harry and Helen are working together as Omega agents. While on a mission at a formal party, they encounter Simon, working as a waiter and pretending to be a spy as before. He runs away in fear, peeing his pants, after they reveal themselves and threaten to kill him. They dance a passionate tango while waiting for their contact and with Gib pleading with them to take their work seriously and get back in contact with him as the end credits roll.

"Alright, nobody move. I have Wayne Campbell's
girlfriend here and I will snap her like a Slim Jim
unless someone tells me where the men's room is."

...and that's True Lies. A boat load of fun! A great one-off entry in James Cameron's directorial filmography. It's so light-hearted in its delivery of sore topics like spousal unfaithfulness, terrorism, nuclear destruction, children-in-peril; it's a movie that probably can't be made today. I know that's such a silly, overused phrase on the internet (especially with movies like Blazing Saddles), but I'm not sure given the conflicts we've had overseas with organizations like Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and ISIL given the impact of our country done by 9/11... True Lies also tends to stand as a monolith reminder of a time we once lived in. I think the comedy really helps this movie's presentation to keep it as a easy-going as we can hope for. Keep it so over-the-top comedically blown out of proportion that people who view the film don't walk away from it feeling scared of the real world around them.

Speaking of the comedy, that was another trademark of this film. Some of Cameron's previous films, namely Aliens... had wit in the lines that were delivered, namely from Bill Paxton's Hudson. This movie had more comedy than any other James Cameron film produced by that point. James Cameron originally hired a team of writers to help him come up with the film's jokes and comedy punchlines. However, after being mostly unsatisfied with their work, Cameron let them go and decided to try his own hand at comedy. He rewrote the script from scratch and kept only two jokes from the team of writers (one of which being Arnold Schwarzenegger's famous "You're fired!" line). Cameron's ability to break away from the hardcore action-film presentation and include some levity in the form of jokes, wit, gags, and funny imagery certainly puts True Lies in a league of its own. Another source of comedy came from an unexpected source. The character Gib, played by Tom Arnold.

"Take it from me, man. Women are no good!
If you don't get married, you've won in life!"
"Pretty easy to say when your only source of
comparison is Roseanne Barr."

Tom Arnold didn't expect to get a role in the movie, and went to the audition mostly for the chance to meet director James Cameron and lead actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He did some scenes with Arnold, and Cameron immediately noticed the chemistry between the two actors. Afterwards, Arnold jokingly said about Schwarzenegger: "He's not that big, I think I can take him", which highly amused Cameron and sealed the deal to make Tom Arnold the other Arnold's buddy. However, 20th Century Fox objected to this casting choice, as Arnold's reputation at the time wasn't positive, mostly due to his public antics with then-wife Roseanne Barr. In a surprising move which Tom never forgot, Cameron threatened to take the movie somewhere else if Arnold couldn't be cast as Gib... telling Fox supposedly "Oh well in that case, I'll drive down the fucking street and make the movie for Paramount instead"... which if you're being told that by the guy who just made Terminator 2... you're going to want to back down and let him have his way, which forced 20th Century Fox to do just that. Tom was grateful to Cameron for taking a chance on him. He became a good friend of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Cameron afterwards.

Another terrific inclusion into the film was Jamie Lee Curtis as Arnold Schwarzenegger's wife, Helen Tasker. She had great chemistry with Schwarzenegger on-screen, and was a fun-loving inclusion to the cast. She gave a dynamite performance of a bored housewife stuck in a rut who wants nothing more than her secret-keeping husband to love her like she loves him, to the point of embarking on an island-hopping, nuke-stopping, limo-jumping, striptease-dancing adventure with him. If you want just a little tidbit as to how cool of guys James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger are, Jamie Lee Curtis said that in his contract, Schwarzenegger gets top billing, then the title, then it would have said starring Jamie Lee Curtis but when James Cameron finished editing the film and he saw that the film was really "a domestic epic, it's a film about a marriage." So James Cameron phoned Arnold Schwarzenegger and asked him if it would be ok to put Jamie Lee Curtis's name before the title, to which Arnold Schwarzenegger immediately agreed. In the world of show business, as Jamie Lee Curtis said, "The credit is such a coveted, negotiable, commodity" that for Arnold Schwarzenegger to give her billing before the title "was a real mensch move on his part."

I know this seems to be the theme of James Camer-thon, but seriously you have to go watch True Lies if you haven't already. It's got action, comedy, romance, one-liners, gunplay, funny stunts, action-stunts, cool hand-to-hand combat scenes, spy-thriller work, buddy cop vibes, domestic-epic vibes, femme-fatales, terrorism, family adventure... it's got literally everything all rolled into a film that's just shy of two and a half hours... and it is just so much fun. It's just so, so much fun. Such a great movie, and yet another solid entry into James Cameron's filmography as a filmmaker. Another five-out-of-five star film.