The case of the disappearing blockbuster: James Cameron's 'True Lies'

The first $100 million movie is simultaneously retrograde, forward-looking and completely of its time.

Last week on Facebook, Jamie Lee Curtis shared a fond memory about a stunt she did for James Cameron’s 1994 action blockbuster True Lies, in which she plays the unknowing wife of a secret agent. It comes towards the end of the movie, when the secret agent dangles from a helicopter and lifts her from the sunroof of a runaway limousine as it’s approaching a gap in the Seven Mile Bridge to the Florida Keys. Though Curtis credits her stuntwoman with performing the more dangerous beats of the sequence, the star herself was wired to the helicopter and spent 20 minutes flying over the water in the late afternoon, even spotting manatees on the ride. She thanks Cameron and her co-star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, for making it possible. At the time, only they had the clout to make a film as big as True Lies, the first movie ever made with a nine-figure budget. 

If you were a moviegoer in 1994, you surely remember this sequence from the year’s third highest-grossing movie, after The Lion King and Forrest Gump. If you’re much younger, you may not know the film exists at all. There was a DVD version of True Lies, but it has never been released on Blu-ray and streaming availability has been spotty at best. Cameron has kept it on his “to do” list for some time, but there are signs that he’s cooled on the film significantly due to its depiction of Muslim terrorists. After 9/11, he abandoned plans for a sequel. In 2003, Curtis told ComingSoon.net that it would never get made because “terrorists aren’t funny anymore. They never were, but [then] it was distant enough from our psyche that we could make it funny. It’ll never be funny again.” 

We resist the word “dated” at The Reveal, because we should have the imagination to understand films in the context of their time, rather than dismiss them out of hand for reflecting, say, the special effects or cultural attitudes of their period. Yet True Lies remains a fascinating relic of a bygone era, as disconnected from our own as that piece of blown-out bridge is from the mainland. It is not revisionist thinking to be startled anew by its racism and misogyny—those were decried at the time, too, by John Simon of National Review no less—or to be wowed by the old-school craftsmanship and sophistication of the action sequences, now mostly a lost art that only a few have sought to preserve.

In part, True Lies is a relic by design. As a comedy about a conventional marriage enlivened by a save-the-world adventure, it’s part throwback to the screwball tradition of couples who find their groove after a wild, unexpected turn of events. In a rave review, Janet Maslin called Schwarzenegger and Curtis “the Nick and Nora Charles of the heavy-demolition set,” referring to the mystery-solving couple played by William Powell and Myrna Loy in 1934’s The Thin Man and its sequels. The Taskers, Harry (Schwarzenegger) and Helen (Curtis), are redefining their institutional roles for the ‘90s just as married couples did in classics from the ‘30s and ‘40s, and like those films, True Lies ends with its couple on equal footing, finally at a place where both feel satisfied with each other and the rebooted state of their partnership. 

Getting to that equal footing is quite a harrowing journey, however, so much so that Cameron’s treatment of Helen might make you wonder if the hard-fought battles for martial equality and mutual respect in the films True Lies evokes had all been for nought. Adapting a little-loved, largely forgotten French spy comedy from 1991 called La Totale!, Cameron does his version of a James Bond thriller, but his 007 is hitched and only as debonair as an ungainly lug like Schwarzenegger can manage. (His dance moves make you question the phrase “it takes two to tango.”) Harry has been leading a double life, having his wife and daughter (Eliza Dushku) believe that he’s a computer salesman when he’s actually an agent for Omega Sector, an ultra-elite intelligence outfit that bills itself as America’s last line of defense. While Harry is off trying to thwart a Islamic terrorist splinter group called—heavy, heavy sigh—“Crimson Jihad,” the prim Helen yawns her way through a job as a legal secretary. 

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Crimson Jihad has plans to test a nuclear warhead and hold American cities under siege, but they’ll have to wait. Harry’s attention is instead drawn back to his wife through a silly, sub-Honeymooners misunderstanding: While popping into her office for a surprise lunch visit, Harry overhears a meeting she’s about to have with “Simon” and assumes that she’s having an affair. His Flintstonian response means all the surveillance technology, weaponry, and manpower at his disposal needs to be redirected to Operation Cuckold, a mission that I just made up. As it happens, Helen is seeing another man, but Simon (Bill Paxton) turns out to be a mustachioed sleaze ball who seduces bored housewives by pretending to be jet-setting spy while, in reality, he’s a used car salesman who lives in a mobile home. 

While allowing for the possibility that Helen is a prototypical target for Simon, his schtick is so transparently ridiculous that it’s an insult to Helen’s intelligence that she doesn’t call him out immediately. To be as generous about this as possible, comedy has never been Cameron’s calling card, and perhaps he felt like Paxton’s buffoonery and cowardice would give his scenes a boost, much as they did in Aliens. But they wind up setting the table for Helen’s grand-scale humiliation at her husband’s behest. After unleashing a full-scale military assault on Simon’s trailer, Harry and his men abduct Helen and toss her into an interrogation room, where she’s forced to sit on a metal stool in front of a two-way mirror and answer intimate questions. 

Again, this seems to be Cameron’s idea of scaled-up comedy. In a normal drama—or, you know, real life—a husband who suspects his wife of infidelity might confront her about it at home. But Operation Cuckold is not about Harry getting to the bottom of the garden-variety betrayal that his marital neglect has earned him. It’s about a grievous assault on his manhood, which he can only answer by asserting his masculinity as ferociously as possible. He’s willing to terrorize his wife to have his questions answered and, when she does convince him of her faithfulness, he still forces her into a fake spy mission that he intends as a kinky bit of role-play. She goes to a hotel, posing as a prostitute tasked with bugging a phone, and winds up doing a pole dance on the footboard of the bed while Harry sits in the shadows, pretending to be a pervy Frenchman. Scenes like these suggest Cameron had enough clout in Hollywood to ignore any notes from the studio. 

In a sense, the Taskers have Crimson Jihad to credit for saving their marriage, because there’s no way Harry can redeem himself without rescuing his wife a few times first. (That introduces yet another problem with True Lies. Cameron has a reputation for putting tough women at the center of his movies, like Sigourney Weaver in Aliens or Linda Hamilton in The Terminator movies, but Helen is mostly a damsel-in-distress here, despite a solid right hook.) Working through a Persian antiquities dealer (Tia Carrere), the deranged leader of Crimson Jihad, Salim Abu Aziz (Art Malik), has smuggled four nuclear warheads and installed himself on an uninhabited island in the Keys. Aziz’s plan is to set a 90-minute timer on one bomb as a demonstration of power, and then use that to threaten America into leaving the Persian Gulf. 

True Lies was released a year after the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 and not long after the first Gulf War, so the decision to make Islamic terrorists the bad guys must have seemed timely yet non-controversial to Cameron and the studio, though the film is thoroughly disinterested in real-world politics. But Cameron makes such cardboard villains out of Aziz and his Crimson Jihad fanatics that they seem like holdovers from ‘80s action movies, when Chuck Norris or Sylvester Stallone would head into the Vietnamese jungle and set about winning the war that America had lost. As an additional insult, Cameron turns Aziz’s men into the Keystone Kops, but unfunny. In one sequence, Helen knocks out about half a dozen of them merely by dropping a machine gun down a flight of stairs. 

With that ocean of caveats aside, however, True Lies still boasts unique qualities that place it among the most rousing action films of its time. Though the Bond movies have had some sturdy directors, they’ve never had a technician of Cameron’s capabilities, and the film’s best sequences balance the weight of practical effects with a sense of giddy, top-that absurdity. There’s one where Harry commandeers a horse from a mounted police officer to give chase to Aziz on his motorcycle, somehow ending at the top of a Marriott and an adjacent rooftop’s pool. There’s a fight scene in the men’s room, full of smashed porcelain and busted pipes, that was practically lifted wholesale for a similar brawl in Mission: Impossible — Fallout. And Cameron’s eye for beauty in the mayhem is on full display when Harry swims his way under a fire that spreads across the surface of a body of water. 

Seeing what $100 million in 1994 can buy on screen is awe-inspiring, particularly when Cameron pummels South Florida with  rocket launchers, helicopters, and fighter jets, taking great chunks out of skyscrapers and bridges. His judgment fails him so often in True Lies, yet his instinct to go big leads to moments that no other director could have conjured, like Schwarzenegger maneuvering through downtown Miami in a jet as if it were another commandeered horse, or the Taskers’ climactic kiss, backdropped by a swell of strings and a nuclear blast.. For all the evident flaws of his might-is-right filmmaking style, Cameron is Cameron because he insists on giving audiences images we’ve never seen before. It’s just that in this case we recoil at some of them—and he seems to have grown up to do so, too. 

True Lies is the strange case of a film that’s alternately retrograde, forward-looking, and thoroughly of its time. For better or worse, it’s a marker of how the Hollywood action blockbuster had advanced in 1994, as well as a commentary (intended or not) on the troubled state of American masculinity, marital relationships, and lingering racial attitudes. Cameron probably has reason to feel hesitant about approving a proper reissue of True Lies, since its ugliest elements will land even worse in 2022 than they did 28 years ago. But it feels like a piece of Hollywood history is missing, as conspicuous as that gap in the bridge.