Cinema Craptastíque: True Lies

The first in a new series of essays about classic, horrible films. 

At some point in the early 1990’s, James Cameron must have decided he was coming off as too talented. After directing four completely watchable action films (The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss and Terminator 2), Jim apparently took an inventory of his creative output and discovered a startling overabundance of logic, dramatic tension, and intelligence. His remedy for this imbalance was 1994’s True Lies. 

True Lies re-teamed Cameron with Terminator’s Arnold Schwarzenegger to tell the inspiring story of a husband and wife who live together for fifteen years, share a bed and raise a daughter, yet somehow wind up knowing less about each other than they do about the guy at the deli counter at Stop-N-Shop. Arnold portrays a government agent whose outfit is so super-secret, even his wife (Jamie Lee Curtis) must be deceived. She believes he’s a sales associate in a computer store. 

I couldn’t spend $3.50 on a hot pretzel without my wife’s knowledge, much less travel to Prague or Turkmenistan to foil an assassination plot. But this is a James Cameron/Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, so the premise is never open to scrutiny. In the universe of True Lies, home and family can be a front for a real personal life full of intrigue and Harrier jet chases. 

Curtis as the wife is also looking for excitement apart from her family, getting friendly with a sleazy used-car dealer (Cameron regular and terminal good-old-boy Bill Paxton) who wows her with made-up stories of his adventures as a – you guessed it – international spy. In a twist that crosses the line from clever over into stupid and back around into senselessly retarded, he happens to have chosen the secret exploits of her husband as the script for his con. Fortunately for him, newspapers in the True Lies universe publish detailed summaries of covert government operations. 

The plot really kicks into high when Arnold discovers his wife’s apparent infidelity and reroutes the full resources of his special task force to teach her a little lesson. Incidentally, if you ever find yourself a member of such a clandestine team, you’ll be overwhelmed by the willingness of your fellow agents to strafe your spouse with an armed helicopter at a moment’s notice. This sequence is artfully punctuated when the Paxton character, exposed, urinates all over himself as he pleads for his life with Schwarzenegger’s gun rammed in his temple. At this point, you just can’t wait to see this loving husband patch things up with his wife. 

In an apparent effort to pander to the ripe misogynist demographic, Cameron tortures the wife further in the film’s most memorable sequence. Boobs are indeed memorable, as are they distracting. Cameron wears this truth like a shield in a completely senseless scene wherein an underwear-clad Curtis dances sexily for her husband in a dark hotel room. Thing is, she doesn’t realize it’s her husband, because he’s playing an audio tape of some other guy’s voice and, you see, it’s dark. 


Blah blah blah. She discovers his secret, they both get kidnapped (by Tia Carerra!) and find themselves the hostages of radical terrorists (not moderate ones) who plan to destroy several major cities with some nuclear bombs they… have. 

One cannot fault Cameron for featuring terrorists as foils for Arnold. This was pre-9/11 America and international terror was still perfect fodder for the blow-‘em-up genre. I did struggle a bit with the way these particular terrorists were portrayed. The film, concerned primarily with outrageous comic action, alternately empathizes with, caricatures, and then demonizes these vaguely Middle Eastern baddies. One moment we’re looking intensely into the eyes of Salim Aziz (Art Malik), feeling his pain, and the next we see him hanging from a cruise missile being informed by a smirking Arnold that he’s about to be “fired” (guffaw). 

There are many many moments throughout the film’s climax when Aziz has every opportunity to shoot Arnold and his family at point blank range, but his boyhood Koran lessons seem to have taught him, above anything else, to honor the pace and tempo of American action movies. 

In the end the terrorists eat fiery, slow-motion death, the hero’s family is reunited, and only one of the Florida Keys is consumed by an immense nuclear explosion. The End. 

Wait, what?! 

Cameron has always been obsessed with nuclear destruction. Heck, the Internet Movie Database even lists his director’s trademark as “nukes.” In the Terminator movies, the nuclear holocaust drives the entire story, providing a ticking clock and a sense of impending doom. In True Lies, the mushroom cloud is the glittering backdrop to a passionate kiss of reconciliation. Thousands are likely dead and hundreds of thousands more will become sick and die slowly, but at least these two selfish liars are making out (Cameron explored this dynamic further in Titanic). 

That’s True Lies in a nutshell, but I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t spend a little time here at the end talking about Mr. Tom Arnold. The appearance of Tom Arnold as Schwarzenegger’s best friend/partner is proof positive that Cameron intended to use this film as a weapon against you and me. 

Every word out of Tom Arnold’s mouth – every stale joke and vulgar whine – seems to be the product of hasty and sloppy ADR, as if he re-dubbed every line from inside a metal lunchbox. His shrill, unfunny presence elevates an already misguided and laughable movie to an unprecedented level of pain. In short, the time we spend with Tom in True Lies makes any Roberto Benigni performance seem subtle and understated.


In his original review of True Lies, not only did Roger Ebert give the film three stars and praise its wit, he wrote the following: 

One nice surprise is Tom Arnold, who has a major role – the equal of Curtis’ – and fills it nicely. He has an everyman quality about him, and an ability to deliver an irreverent aside, which make him a good foil for Schwarzenegger.

Mr. Ebert remains my critic of choice and I respect his opinions endlessly. In this case I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he thought he was actually watching David Byrne’s True Stories and is really thinking of John Goodman’s performance in that film. 

James Cameron’s next film was Titanic. You can really see the lessons he learned from True Lies at work in that film. This time he chose a tragic historical event as the backdrop for his tedious, implausible love story and sacrificed the inane humor for painfully obvious historical references (hey, I’ve heard of Pablo Picasso!). 

At this rate of atrophy, Cameron’s next film (announced but untitled) is poised to redefine Cinema Craptastíque. Bring it on. 

For more information about True Lies, jump out of the nearest window. On the way to the hospital, ask the EMT if he knows anything about the film.