Fixing ‘True Lies’: or My Response to Watching ‘True Lies’ For the First Time

Yeah, so believe it or not, I had never seen James Cameron’s 1994 action-comedy hit ‘True Lies’ until this week. Now that I have and it’s very much in my brain, I gotta few thoughts and questions I’d like to put out there as my belated response to a once-big, now (more than a little) dated entertainment.

Off the bat, I’ll just come out and say I wasn’t exactly taken with this flick (maybe you got that from the “dated” comment above) in the way I might have expected to be with something from James Cameron in this period, or from all the people who’ve gotten excited when I say I’ve never seen ‘True Lies.’ The action stuff is a good time, and naturally, given the filmmaker, well-crafted and visually stunning; but the whole thing is kind of a weird, bloated and very sexist experience. Yet since the premise is amusing and, like I said, the action stuff is really cool, imagine with me a better version of what this could have been…

First off, the second act of the movie has got to go. The movie’s two hours and twenty minutes long and we spend a good 40 in the middle of it on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s super spy character Harry Tasker investigating his wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis) to determine if she’s having an affair. He discovers she’s been meeting with a sleazy used car salesman, Simon, (Cameron regular Bill Paxton) who tells the ladies he’s a spy who desperately needs their help on his missions so they’ll sleep with him. Harry uses the full power of his government agency to kidnap the pair of would-be-lovers before they’re allowed to bang (though it’s clear to the audience Helen is there for the thrill of the spy business, and isn’t really the unfaithful type) and interrogates his wife regarding her fidelity from behind a one-way mirror and eventually forces her to do a strip tease/pole dance for his amusement while she believes she and her family will be severely punished by the government if she doesn’t comply.

I was three years old in the summer of ’94 when this film was released, so I can’t really tell you how this material played to audiences at the time (I’m guessing it wasn’t quite as uncomfortable to most, and I’ll assume many men approved of the nearly-nude Curtis dancing), but watching it now this stuff is frankly, really gross. Arnold also humiliates and threatens Simon — and it’s not like the Paxton character doesn’t deserve it — but this loser is so out of Tasker’s league that it feels a bit like when Superman goes back to the random redneck bar where some guy bested him after he lost his powers, specifically to make a show of beating up the now-essentially-defenseless bully in front of his friends in ‘Superman II.’ Maybe that’s a pretty accurate representation of how a lot of people felt in Reagan’s America but that’s not how I like to see my fictional heroes behave.

So cut all the Paxton/investigating Helen stuff, maybe add 10–15 minutes of screwball comedy in the middle that still conveys that the Tasker’s marriage is in a rut and the guy’s wife and daughter think he’s a boring square, and suddenly we’re down to under two hours and minus a lot of boring, awkward content. Curtis does the best she can with the material, and that’s honestly a lot, but does anyone, even in a movie that’s practically a full-blown farce like this one, believe Schwarzenegger as either brilliant spy or dull businessman? I know everyone in the ’80s and ’90s kind of just accepted this guy was going to star in action movies and if you bought a ticket you might just be able to turn your brain off, ignore the stilted performance, admire the guy’s absurd body and enjoy the big explosions and corny one-liners. But (and I say this as a big fan of ‘Predator’ and ‘Total Recall’ in particular) when, outside of the ‘Terminator’ franchise, did you ever really think Arnold was well-suited to a specific character?

Since Harry Tasker is much more Bond than Rambo, why not cast someone in that mold instead? Naturally casting Schwarzenegger for his star power made a lot of sense in ’94, but imagine having a guy like Pierce Brosnan in the role. Brosnan was still a year away from his first appearance as 007 at the time, and of course he could’ve handled the action stuff as a more cartoonish version of Bond, but I also think he’d have done a really good job as the bumbling Clark Kent his family is supposed to see him as. Tom Cruise (then in his early 30s) might have been a bit young to play a family man with a teen daughter but depending how much of an ego trip you caught him in in his career he could have been a good fit for role as well — so long as he could allow himself to be appear truly uncool in the domestic setting.

Also, and this is less of a criticism, but why in the hell was this movie not PG-13? This isn’t to say I’m offended by the swearing or the blood or anything, but there’s really not that much of either, so I can’t imagine (unless the MPAA took into consideration offensive attitudes, which would be hard to believe given the kind of stuff that cleared the PG line in the ’80s) why Fox wouldn’t push for a larger teen audience for a pretty silly film kids would obviously enjoy. Maybe in the ’90s they figured the under-17 crowd who could get themselves to the multiplex would see it anyway and most theaters didn’t card? (And as someone who had to attempt what sometimes felt like ‘Mission: Impossible’ level cons to get into R-rated films the first few years of high school, more than a decade since I’ve been officially not-restricted in my theater visits, I can tell you that idea still rather ticks me off.) Probably just a case of “we’re going to say yes to the guy who just made ‘Terminator 2,’” but it does seem like a missed opportunity for extra business there.

And another dumb thing: after the bridge sequence (which is awesome, by the way, I admit it) Harry is told by spy sidekick Tom Arnold (could we really have not gotten a funnier, less-annoying foil than Tom Arnold?) that his daughter has been taken as a hostage by the terrorists, now holed up in a Miami skyscraper. Harry grabs a Harrier Jump Jet, (which he has a rough time flying at first, but he gets the hang of it real quick) and races to the final standoff. His daughter (Eliza Dushku) has grabbed the nuclear missile key and run to the roof, but Harry, the big dummy, who has no way of knowing this, just shows up and immediately opens fire, wiping out an entire floor of bad guys standing around where his daughter who he’s come to save presumably is as well. You know what, maybe Arnold was the right choice for Harry Tasker after all…

Finally, I’m not saying the bad guy has to be some computer whiz who’s going to hack the country into blowing itself up or something (believe me, I don’t need another story like that) — I’m fine with the baddies simply hijacking a couple missiles and doing some typical action movie posturing — but did every villain need to be the most basic middle-eastern terrorist stereotype? There’s another thing that definitely wouldn’t make it into the movie now (unless maybe the movie happened to be made for a fraction of the ‘True Lies’ budget and star Gerald Butler. Shots fired!).

I don’t know if James Cameron (who I certainly won’t deny has made some of the best action movies ever) has necessarily changed his opinion on the merit of ‘True Lies’ or, more likely, he’s realized how much distaste a more “woke” audience would have for the story’s antiquated gender politics. I suspect that’s why he’s still not made the film available on blu-ray, or even to buy or rent in any HD streaming format, which is more than a little unusual for a movie which grossed nearly 400 million dollars.

So there you have it, that’s my basic take on what would make ‘True Lies,’ if not a great then certainly a wittier and less embarrassing movie. If you feel so inspired, go ahead and comment to let me know if I’m on to something or if alternatively if you feel I’m full of crap and should never review a movie again. And lastly if this piece has made you wanna revisit ‘True Lies’ or check it out for the first time, HBO tells me it’s on there till June 1, so go ahead and sign into your account (or jump on that free trial baby!) and do that real soon cause, as I said, FOX & Cameron & Co. have made it a bit of a difficult movie to watch nowadays unless you wanna hook up your VHS player again…