Written by: James Cameron
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, Bill Paxton, Art Malik, Tia Carrere
Rating: [2/5]
Honesty in relationships should come as something everyone should agree upon, especially when entering into the covenant of marriage with someone. If honesty should be shared with anyone, it should be one’s spouse yet we know that not to be the case most of the time. In some cases you have instances where men live double lives, but not often does the other life entail being a secret agent like we see in True Lies. A film with so much working for it on an action level but when looking at the story proves to be quite the dumpster fire.
While married with kids and living a normal life, Harry Tasker (Arnold Schwarzenegger) actually moonlights as a secret agent to no one’s knowledge, including his wife. When he overhears that his wife may be having an affair, he uses his resources to give her the thrill she’s seeking but accidentally gets her mixed up in his most recent dangerous mission dealing with nuclear warheads.
Questioning James Cameron is not something I do often but when his movies don’t work they fall flat on their face, which True Lies fits right into. On paper, it has everything one could want in an adventure romp down to the cast and with the director of some of the greatest action movies ever made at the helm. What’s not to like? Well, Cameron’s weakness has always been his writing and what we get in this feature shows this particular weakness flair up in such a heinous fashion.
Fundamentally this feature has no real issues where you have a man living a double life as a spy, but what transpires when Harry learns of his wife potentially having an affair is questionable at best and horrendous at its worst. We essentially have a man who has lied to his wife for 15 years about what he does in life and then he spends the majority of this film continuing to manipulate her to the point where she gets dragged into an incredibly dangerous situation. The scene that takes the cake occurs in the most famous sequence of the entire film where Jamie Lee Curtis strips down to her underwear and tries, under threat of harm, to perform an erotic dance. It remains famous because Curtis looks amazing but the context of the scene blows my mind. Curtis’s character believes she needs to perform a sexual act or she’ll be killed when it’s her husband there making her think her life is in peril. Was this meant to be funny? I find it odd Cameron would grant such a demeaning experience for a woman at the hands of the heroic protagonist all for a laugh. The same Cameron who has helped elevate the greatest women action heroes in history with Sarah Conner and Ellen Ripley. Everything about this decision made me scratch my head and I could not let it go as the film continued.
For all of the issues this feature contains, which are many, it still has some incredible action sequences. Something undoubtedly upholding its reputation as an action classic. When firing on all cylinders this feature delivers some strong sequences that do everything one could want from an action film, which started to make up for all of the other nonsense, but not quite. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as always in the 1980s brought his charm and physique to a role that demanded it and, of course, sold all of the action sequences very well. This comes as no surprise and remains something that’s a given when these two work together just like when he worked with Cameron as a robot.
However, with all being said, True Lies, as a whole feels like such a mean-spirited feature weirdly aimed right at Helen Tasker. Jamie Lee Curtis elevates this character and should receive the acclaim she has but did it despite the material she got from Cameron. For as strong as the action sequences were, the film had some terrible pacing that did not help with this feature carrying an eye-watering 140-minute runtime that felt like it took eons to complete. Ultimately, there are bits and pieces of this feature that work so well that it angers me that this feature remains so rotten at its core it never had a chance. Far and away James Cameron’s worst film.
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