04/28/10 - True Lies

True Lies (1994, 141 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111503/

This was another one of my roommate's selections. With this film, I can now say I've seen all of James Cameron's major movies. Sure, I haven't seen Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, but that's really not on my list of things to watch ever.

Here we have Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a special agent for the government named Harry Tasker. His wife is Helen Tasker (Jamie Lee Curtis) and isn't aware of his job at all. However, things end up complicating themselves in typical action movie and romantic comedy crossover fashion. Helping Harry lead this double life is his field partner Albert Gibson (Tom Arnold). The main "bad guy" here is Salim Abu Aziz played by Art Malik.

Cameron is known for his huge action scenes and relatively lighter plots. Or at least that's what I think of him as. The same is mostly true here. The action is a little more dated than stuff like Terminator 2: Judgment Day which held up amazingly well. Here the CGI is frequently visible or the "Wow" factor just isn't as great. First, there's an opening scene which mostly takes place outside in the snow but also a little inside of a huge fancy social gathering. Anyway, this whole scene seemed straight out of a James Bond movie (mix some social gathering from just about any Bond film and then throw in the snow chase from On Her Majesty's Secret Service). I didn't like the opening that much to be honest. Arnold seemed somewhat out of his element here as an upper class socialite at the party. The final part is where most of the action is. There's a middle bit of action with a shootout but I didn't like it that much. The grand finale is really split into two parts. There's a really cool helicopter chase where Jaime Lee Curtis barely is pulled out of a crashing car. This part is amazing. Then there's a part where Harry pilots a jet to take out the remaining enemies. This part wasn't that amazing. I think the main reason here was that the "unbelievability factor" skyrocketed here and it just made the whole scene lose its luster. While the other half with the car chase wasn't incredibly believable it was still believable enough to be fun. Overall, the action is typical amazing Cameron quality but I just didn't think it was good as the really high bar he'd set with some other films.

Next, I think the pairing of Schwarzenegger and Curtis was somewhat awkward at first. In the end I think it ended up working. Curtis seems to have a lot of fun in the role and Schwarzenegger does his typical A+ work for the action scenes. There's the corny (yet highly quotable) lines that we all know and love so that adds some to the overall performance. I think Arnold did a great job as well. He was pretty well cast as he had just enough lines to be a secondary character but not so much as to ever really do too much in a scene. The bad guys were okay but never all that menacing in my opinion.

Next, True Lies does this weird combination of romantic comedy and action movie as I mentioned above. It works really well. The jokes work and never really fall flat since they're always supposed to be corny. I don't really think this genre mixing works all that well most of the time but it's fine here.

Finally, the worst part of True Lies is the middle section. After the opening huge action scene and up until about thirty minutes before the final action scene we don't have much to work with. Here is where the action movie throws out the "plot section" which isn't handled that well. Sure, I'll give the film somewhat of a pass as I'm not watching the film for a cool plot (or really any plot at all) but just some action. However, the movie does try to do some things here with another character named Simon (Bill Paxton) but this secondary plot just doesn't end up being at all important so all this time is wasted. Some pacing problems on the whole in my opinion.

Overall, I gave this film a 6/10. True Lies is still good just like everything else James Cameron has done. I hesitate to say that it's my least favorite movie he's made. Honestly, this is pretty good since I don't think many directors could say a good movie is actually their worst.