Directed by James Cameron. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, Tia Carrere, and Bill Paxton.
Another example of Cameron's taking someone else's concept and running with it is TRUE LIES (1994), the only out-and-out comedy in Cameron's filmography. It is, of course, also an action movie -- as well as belonging to that particular subset of action movies, Arnold movies -- but it's Cameron going for laughs. Laughs he gets, as well as thrills, in perhaps the most expensive comedy ever made (TRUE LIES was the first film to have a $100 million budget).
The movie has an unusual set of writing credits. It says "Screenplay by James Cameron," followed immediately by "Based on a screenplay by" three other writers. Even without knowing the details, this alone tells me that there were some knotty legal battles over writing credit, with Cameron insisting that he rewrote the script extensively enough to claim full credit, yet he did not invent the basic premise himself. In fact, it looks as if the project had been in development for a while, with one writer coming up with the story and writing at least one draft, then a pair of writers coming in to rework it, before Cameron finally took up the project. This means that other directors, and perhaps other stars, were attached to it before Cameron came in and made it his third successful team-up with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Schwarzenegger had grown as a star and an actor since Cameron effectively launched him to superstardom in THE TERMINATOR a decade earlier. Having cannily alternated between action/drama and comedy for each new project, Schwarzenegger had matured into a movie actor capable of handling the frothy mix of comedy and action Cameron serves up here, as well as the satiric suavity necessary to convince us that he's a super spy in the mold of James Bond.
Watching the action set-piece in the movie's opening, I was moved to wonder whether, perhaps, Cameron had been tapped at some point or another as a director for the James Bond franchise. I can imagine that he went fairly far into negotiations and development on such a project, only to eventually bow out. However, he seems to have taken with him a store of ideas he still wanted to use. A team of machine gun-wielding enemies on skis is unmistakeably a Bond movie trope, having been used at least three times in that franchise (try THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977) and FOR YOUR EYES ONLY (1981), as well as _____). It is preposterous to imagine the thickly-accented Austrian as a master of languages, dashing off "perfect Arabic" (as we're told in a parenthetical subtitle!), but it works; it's also hilarious because of its jokiness on that meta-level. Arnold Schwarzenegger as James Bond, master spy; master of everything, in fact: from riding horses to piloting jet aircraft, from marksmanship to fluent French.
Aiding Schwarzenegger and Cameron in this enterprise are a team of smart comic actors. Jamie Lee Curtis, as Arnold's frowsy wife (who blossoms into a tough, sexy action spy wife), does a superb job. Her work was so good, in fact, that she's still exploiting the character she creates here in a series recent cellular phone commercials. Her scene of transformation, shedding her housewife mousiness and unleashing her inner seductress, vamping with a bedpost, moves startlingly, charmingly, and always comedically, from embarrassing self-consciousness to exultant extroversion. Cameron casts Tom Arnold as the hero's best friend; Tom Arnold responds by giving the performance of his career. He does his standard regular-guy shtick, but in this perfectly crafted role he manages to come across as friendly, trustworthy, benign, conscientious, and intelligent. You like him; you see why his friend Harry (Schwarzenegger) likes him; he has some of the best lines in the movie (some of them probably ad-libbed), and he steals a lot of great moments in all of the scenes he's in without ever entirely stealing the scene itself. He lets Schwarzenegger be the star, lets Schwarzenegger be funny, too. It's a terrific supporting performance. Lastly, we have Cameron regular Bill Paxton (ALIENS, TITANIC) turning on the full smarmy charm. With a don't-trust-me mustache and a full spectrum of shit-eating grins, Paxton hams his way through his role as a screwball foil; it's a role that requires him to lose all dignity, twice wetting his pants. He plays an absolutely miserable slob of a man, pathetic to the point of pain (especially in the first pants-wetting scene, in which he pleads desperately for the two Arnolds to spare his worthless, tiny life), and yet he manages to make the audience feel slightly symapethetic about him. Certainly we don't hate this character. He's there to be laughed at, but not hated, and that's a tricky thing to pull off in a character with so many obviously awful qualities.
Cameron broadens his color palette somewhat in TRUE LIES, but some things don't change. Right off the bat, we see Arnold Schwarzenegger in scuba gear, swimming underwater in a deep blue pool. We also see pure green, flaring on Tom Arnold's face from his high-tech equipment. Later in the film, we see orange. Notably, the MIRV warhead that the terrorists steal is decorated in green with an orange nose cap.
Cameron's use of blue as his primary color goes unabated here, but he's softened it. [Note - check out the names of Cameron's various cinematographers, especially for TRUE LIES.] Instead of a stark, pure blue, the blue washes in TRUE LIES are whitened, often appearing as a cool, refreshing, minty blue. The whole Cameron color scheme is generally lightened here, and a good deal of the film is noticeably brighter than Cameron's general stock in trade, perhaps underscoring the mood of light comedy. It also resembles, somewhat, the lighting of classic Hollywood movies, with its full, white illumination of large and expensive sets. The movie alternates between night scenes and daytime scenes, with a full day's revolution going on from about halfway through the movie until the end: day, evening, night, morning, and ending at noontime. Atypically, the climax of the film happens in broad daylight instead of at night -- compare this to THE TERMINATOR, ALIENS, TERMINATOR 2, THE ABYSS, and TITANIC.
In terms of action, TRUE LIES continues Cameron's zeal for false endings, for set pieces upon set pieces, climaxes that seem to be the end-all-be-all of action climaxes, only to raise the stakes moments later and go charging into yet another, bigger, brassier action situation. One surprise: Cameron sets up a cliche, the ticking nuclear time bomb, and then ignores the obvious solution, which is for his James Bond hero to rush in and deactivate it in the nick of time. Nope -- all the good guys can do is clear everyone out of a 12 mile radius, and let the nuclear bomb go off. Cheekily, the hero and heroine, reunited as man and wife with their eyes fully opened to each other's secret lives, consummate their renewed marriage with a kiss just as the "holy fire" erupts in the distance behind them, a blinding white flash followed by a mushroom cloud. I'm not sure what he's trying to say here, but I think he's just being cheeky and somewhat witty, writ on a large scale.
The nuclear bomb goes off, and the hero and heroine kiss, and all is well -- but not quite. The movie seems like it could end here, but in fact we haven't even gotten to the part where Schwarzenegger takes off in a jet aircraft and saves his daughter, dangling from a crane perched atop a high-rise office building. Good grief!
I want to back up, though, and follow the trail of action climaxes Cameron sets up, one after the other. This was a big summer movie, a hugely successful one. Even if Cameron was just having big fun with his big fun summer movie, he knew he had to really deliver: producing a hit summer movie would give him the leverage, finally, to bring his TITANIC to the big screen. A flop would kill the chances for that, especially a mind-bogglingly expensive one like this. Cameron spent $100 million on this movie, but it's all there on screen, and he delivered and delivered and delivered on the investment.
The movie opens with a big action set-piece, with rather beautifully lighted explosions of snow against dark skies. It goes on and on, but it's really just setting things up; it's the prologue, the popcorn opener. There's an easygoing first act, setting up the characters, the terrorist threat, the double-life of the hero, etc. It includes a furious action scene in a public restroom, followed by a mostly-for-laughs comic chase, with the bad guy on a motorcycle, Schwarzenegger chasing him on horseback, all the way through the lobby of a swanky hotel, up the elevators, and onto the roof. Cameron uses some tried-and-true comedy gags here, with a staged shot of hotel visitors going about their business, then reacting with double-takes as a motorcycle roars through the lobby, then reacting again as a large Austrian on horseback chases by two beats later. He also introduces a running gag here, with Schwarzenegger calling out "Sorry!" as he passes through. He says this as if he were apologizing for knocking over a glass of milk or accidentally jostling someone in a grocery store. At the tail end of act one, the hero learns that his wife is having an affair -- or so he thinks -- with Paxton's character, who is a used car salesman who pretends to be a super spy in order to score with lonely women who need more excitement in their lives.
Act two is rather sprawling, taking us from this point all the way to the setup for the many big action payoffs in the last thirty-five minutes of the movie. Using (and abusing) agency resources, Schwarzenegger busts in on Paxton and Curtis and hauls them off to be interrogated. He just wants to find out if his wife slept with Paxton, and the answer is no, but he finds out a lot more about his wife in the process. It's a creepy scene of power roles; rather than talk to his wife openly, he conducts an interview from behind one-way glass, leaving her in a position of extreme vulnerability and emotional nakedness. Frightened at first, the situation brings something out of her that nobody knew was there: fierce inner strength. Since she's admitted that she was going along with Paxton's goofy spy story just to have some wild, crazy adventure in her life, Schwarzenegger concocts an equally creepy scene of power roles: pretending to send his wife on a mission to plant a bug in the bedroom of a suspected arms dealer, he makes her do a striptease dance for him. At the end of this playful but astonishing scene, the terrorists show up, kidnap both of them, and jet them to a secret base camp in the Florida Keys.
By this point, all of the lies are exposed and all of the truth is on the table. All that's left is for an exciting escape. The hero reveals his perfect technique for breaking people's necks; he does this move so many times that Cameron, again with a bit of cheekiness, starts to abbreviate it. We see a terrorist being yanked off screen by two muscular arms, we hear a crunch, a crack, and a click, and a quick cut to reveal Schwarzenegger locking-and-loading the machine gun of the guy he's just killed. Snap, crackle, pop, let's go.
There is much machine gun fire here, with Curtis getting to try her hands on an uzi. Absolutely ridiculously, she drops the weapon down a staircase, where it tumbles down like a Slinky, shooting a few rounds with every step, and by the time it settles down about a dozen terrorists have been riddled with bullets and have died. I don't want to say that death is funny, but this silliness only works as comedy. We're no longer adhering to real rules of danger. If you can drop a gun and wipe out a platoon of terrorists, you're in a fantasy world. It's just for laughs.
Cameron makes the most of the hero's built-in super-resourcefulness, turning a gasoline tank into a makeshift flamethrower, allowing him to napalm another ten or twelve dozen badguys in the capstone to this whole escape sequence. The main bad guy takes out a bazooka and blows up the gas tank, forcing the hero to dive underwater. Again we go underwater in a Cameron movie -- although this time, it's a little different. With flames spreading over the water's surface, everything underwater is orange and red instead of the usual blue. Then we see helicopters arriving in the orange haze of morning sunlight, announcing that act two is over and act three, the climax, is here. The preceding sequence lasts what seems like a good fifteen minutes, and might have been a pretty good ending to the movie in ordinary circumstances. Cameron is just getting warmed up.
So there's this twenty-mile long bridge. The good guys have aircraft: jets and helicopters, and plenty of munitions. The heroine is trapped in a limousine on the bridge, so the first order of business is to rescue her. What amazes me is that Cameron uses several million dollars in visual effects to stage a truly dazzling shot of four missiles blowing the hell out of the bridge -- this would be the big money shot, the payoff in any other movie -- and all it is, really, is a gimmick to set up the suspense of rescuing Jamie Lee Curtis before the limo goes off the end of the destroyed bridge. Before that, though, there's another scene just for laughs at the expense some terrorists, who are starting to seem more and more like comic props than genuine threats to the hero or to the world. A truck with three terrorists in it stops just in time to teeter precariously over the edge of the bridge. After some panicked scrambling to distribute their weight in the truck, they manage to sustain a balance, so that the truck won't fall. Just as they start whooping their delighted relief, an albatross lands on the hood of the truck, adding just enough weight to send it over the edge. The bird just kind of flits away after having done this. The truck, of course, explodes. This only seems weird to me because the gag only works if, for a moment, we sympathize with these characters as human beings, if happy faces are given to these people who have narrowly escaped a grisly fate. Then a bird causes them to be roasted in orange exploding flames. Oh well. It's all for laughs, I guess.
So then there's a big bad hair-pulling catfight in the limousine between Curtis, no longer a shrinking violet but something of a tigress, and the femme fatale, Tia Carrere. Both of the women are in miniskirts, and as they yank and pull and punch, we almost get to see up their skirts a number of times. I don't think this is accidental. Hey, what's better than a couple of sexy women having a catfight in miniskirts in a limousine? Given all of the strange sexual politics of the movie in general, it's not surprising, I guess.
The rescue of Curtis, which requires some rather dazzling stuntwork -- low-flying helicopters, cars, people dangling from each -- is achieved by the heroine once more finding a surge of hidden inner strength, heaving herself upward, her arm latching and linking with her husband's. She's whisked up and away, the limo meets its fiery end. This certainly feels like the end of the movie. The big action of the exploding bridge has been one-upped by the action-suspense (and bigger emotional involvement) of saving the heroine. All is calm, everyone is on safe ground, there's the big kiss, the big explosion. Credits can roll now, but no -- the terrorists have kidnapped their daughter.
Schwarzenegger climbs into a jet, smunches a couple of cars ("Sorry!" he says again), and takes off roaring into the skies. Meanwhile, the daughter proves herself to be a chip off the old block, demonstrating the same daring and resourcefulness of both her parents. She steals the detonation key from a second nuclear device, escapes to the roof, and clambers out onto this yellow crane. (There's the Cameron yellow again.) The hero arrives in his little aircraft, and shoots out the entire 20th floor of an office building, demonstrating Cameron's seeming urge to go over the top in every possible way. There are some rather beautiful effects shots here, and a display of keen cinematic ideas for airplane action. One particularly nice shot shows the pip-pip-pip exploding whitecaps of armaments hitting distant water, and then the exploding of glass and concrete in a nearer building -- an excellent example of visual motion and perspective in depth.
Meanwhile, both the daughter and the main bad guy terrorist are out on the yellow construction crane. Schwarzenegger pulls up underneath them, and we end up with the daughter and the terrorist hanging onto the plane as the hero tries to engage in a fistfight, keep the plane level in the air, and hold onto his daughter before she falls. This is all outrageously silly, but at least we know, this time, that this is probably the movie's last word in terms of action climaxes. I was more than a little surprised when Cameron uses this moment -- of all moments -- to engage in the absolute lowest of slapstick gags. First of all, there's a comedic set-up where an oblivious janitor in the building fails to notice a swinging jet aircraft tail missing the window behind him by about five inches. He's wearing headphones, of course. Then we get the payoff, where the plane actually smashes its tail all the way through the window, devastating the entire room that the guy had just cleaned up, and the janitor's shocked reaction. What happens then? The terrorist is thrown backwards by the impact, does a backwards somersault, and racks his nuts on the tail of the airplane! I couldn't believe it, really. This guy is no longer anything resembling a threat. Racked in the nuts. Can you believe it? At the big climax of this whole movie? This is why I said TRUE LIES was an out-and-out comedy. Let me say that one more time just so I can try to believe it. The main bad guy, at the big final action climax of the movie, gets hit in the testicles and does the "WOoOOooughhHH!" noise, the crossed eyes, the whole bit. $100 million, folks.
I was highly amused by the final dispatch of this comic villain. Cameron makes good, actually hilarious, use of the action genre's big trademarks (or cliches, if you want): the final, smirking, play-on-words, "The joke's on you!" catchphrase that the hero gets to utter right before killing the main bad guy. In this case, the terrorist ends up hanging by a strap of his clothing from one of the jet's missiles. Schwarzenegger shoots him a smirk, says "You're fired," and -- WHOOOOOZSHHHHH! -- launches the badguy. I had the same reaction watching it this time as I did when in a packed theater in the summer of 1994. It's actually a terrific audience moment. You almost groan at the "You're fired" line, but as soon as he hits that trigger and actually LAUNCHES THE BAD GUY on a missile, in a terrific effects shot, you want to laugh, holler, and cheer all at the same time. It's just a hilariously great thing to see, the bad guy being launched on a missile. Not only that, but the missile flies straight through the building (the 20th floor, which had been cleared out a few minutes earlier, remember -- Cameron again doing a huge expensive sequence merely as a set-up to a later payoff), out the other side, where it hits the helicopter containing the last remaining enemy terrorists! I was already laughing before that, but even just sitting at home I had to start applauding and whistling. The inventive economy of it -- launching the bad guy through the building in order to blow up everyone who was left in one fell swoop. Now that's an ending.
My hat's off to Cameron. He must have known how goofy it was. I can imagine him chuckling to himself when he thought it up. I can imagine the pencil pushers crying when they figured out what the budget would be for all of this stuff. I can barely imagine what he's going to pull out of his hat when he does the sequel. If he feels the need to top what he did in the first one in terms of big action, it's going to be so over-the-top it will poke up into some undiscovered hyper dimension. Some sort of superstring theory will be needed to process it fully.