I may not love every James Cameron movie I've ever seen, but they all would receive at least 3.5 stars from me on Letterboxd -- with one exception. (Emphasis on "I've ever seen," as I am not a Cameron completist. I have not seen Piranha II: The Spawning.)
That exception is True Lies, which I laughed and groaned through during my single viewing in the summer of 1994.
One of those sounds positive, but I was laughing for the wrong reasons. (Actually, there's one really legitimately funny joke in the movie, which a friend of mine and I would quote back and forth. When Bill Paxton puts Jamie Lee Curtis' head in his lap while he's driving his convertible, and a surveilling Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Arnold notice this, Tom Arnold quips "Maybe she's sleepy." For some reason we always thought his line delivery there was hilarious.)
The fact that the best joke in this movie is one about implied blow jobs really gives you an idea of how the tone is off in True Lies. And that's the problem I still have with the movie today.
In case you need reminding, this is a film where Schwarzenegger's spy character spends the majority of the movie -- I think it's fair to say that -- spying on his own wife to see if she is cheating on him. It's pretty gross and it really goes against the good guy persona Schwarzenegger had been cultivating in his last few movies, especially the delightful Kindergarten Cop.
The thing is, True Lies actually sees him as a good guy rather than a jealous creep, and that's part of the problem.
If he were just obsessed with the possible adultery as a result of being an insecure fool, that would be one thing. But he becomes kind of a creepy perv -- there's that word "creep" again -- when he concocts a ridiculous and logistically improbable scenario where he's going to sit in a darkened hotel room as she strips down to the sexy lingerie he asked her to wear, all while using a series of pre-recorded phrases on a tape recorder so she won't know it's him.
Set aside for a moment that this is twisted and needlessly perverse for a mainstream movie. What I want to know is, how the hell did Harry Tasker think this would even work? Any movie that relies on someone using pre-recorded dialogue on a tape recorder strains all credibility for me -- yes, even the bit in Ferris Bueller's Day Off -- but this just takes that way over the top. You get the sense that it's really important that Helen does not identify that it's Harry there in that room, yet he takes all sorts of risks, like trailing a flower down her face after he's told her to keep her eyes closed, while relying on a highly flimsy setup with very little chance of succeeding. Given how bizarre it also is on a character level, that scene should have just been pulled altogether.
Though in 1994, I wasn't really liking True Lies even before that. The cold open is competently executed and I have fairly fond memories of Schwarzenegger riding his horse on an elevator as he pursues the Arab terrorists who are the villains in this film. (One element that dates it, as Arab terrorists as villains in a movie today would just promote unhelpful anti-Islamic sentiments.) But I remember finding the setup to be lacking, the set pieces not doing enough to make up for it, and then the whole thing being sexist and gross.
If you are considering similar sorts of filmmakers being on a continuum from prestige to hack, you'd ordinarily put James Cameron on the prestige side (maybe with Christopher Nolan even above him) and Michael Bay on the hack side, with maybe Zack Snyder in between them. In True Lies, though, it's like Cameron's inner Bay came out. (It would have to be pre-Bay, though, since Bay had not yet made his first film in 1994.) The focus on the body of Jamie Lee Curtis in this movie is fairly shameless, not only in the stripping scene, but elsewhere. You get a clear view of her cleavage for most of the last 30 minutes of the movie, and what's worse, she's acting a bit like Kate Capshaw acts in the second half of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, always complaining and screaming and requiring saving.
I feel like this movie was a misstep for both Schwarzenegger and Cameron, and yet I feel like it is basically seen as of a piece with the other star vehicles for the former and films for the latter. Sure, True Lies had stiff competition from other Cameron movies in the 1990s, as this movie was bookended by the stone-cold classics Terminator 2: Judgment Day on one side and Titanic on the other. Tough to compete with that. Most people, though, would probably consider True Lies the equal of a film like The Abyss, when I really think that's being unfair to The Abyss.
My opinion of the movie did not change this time around. I will say, however, that it has some moments that I think are pretty iconic, such as:
1) The shot of Arnold as he swims under water while there is an explosion going over him. I doubt Cameron was the first person to do that shot, but I feel like that shot gets used a lot in montages or Oscar clips.
2) The limo falling away as Arnold grabs on to Jamie Lee's arm from the helicopter.
3) The fight atop the harrier jet. It's ridiculous, but in a good way.
4) This exchange of dialogue while Arnold is on truth serum, which may actually qualify as the film's second good joke:
Helen: "So have you ever killed anyone?"
Harry: "Yeah but they were all bad."
True Lies is not bad. It's misguided, but it's not bad.
I don't really think it's good either, though.
Probably the most interesting thing about it is it's weird existence as a series of questionable choices shoved into a really expensive action movie package, and its dated gender politics and Islamophobia.
And speaking of that Islamophobia ... one thing I discovered on this viewing, and I'm glad to have discovered it so I can stop making this mistake, is that I thought Kiwi Cliff Curtis played the lead villain, Salim Abu Aziz. I've always thought that and I've mentioned it to people on occasion.
He's actually played by Art Malik. You'll have to let me know if you think the two are similar enough for me to have made this mistake legitimately, or if I was just an idiot.
Here's Art:
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