In “True Lies,” writer-director James Cameron and star Arnold Schwarzenegger blow up or run wild through large parts of the Miami Keys and Washington, D.C., trying to demonstrate that supermen are human, that elite killer-spies are real folks, just like you and me. The movie is a super-high-tech festival of carnage, but there’s something wacky about it. As buildings, trucks, bridges and whole islands explode and villains and bystanders get whacked by the dozens, the filmmakers begin to seem like mad bombers united in a crazy cause, destroying everything in a quest to make us laugh.
“True Lies” is another spare-no-expense crash-a-thon like the last Schwarzenegger-Cameron special, “Terminator 2,” and it’s full of helicopter chases, hostage shootouts, machinegun orgies and one rousing cliffhanger scene in which three people scramble around the open cockpit and wings of a hovering Harrier jet. It’s a heavy-industrial shocker, and Cameron and Schwarzenegger are guys who dream big. Their idea of a throwaway joke is to have a nuclear bomb explode in the background while Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis go into a clinch. (Maybe this shot is an apocalyptic version of the famous fireworks-kissing scene in “To Catch a Thief.”)
But, while “Terminator 2” was at least a typical Hollywood concoction-a hit sequel with a multiplied budget-here the notion, borrowed from the Claude Zidi French comedy “La Totale,” is really outlandish. Schwarzenegger’s Harry Tasker is an American version of James Bond, a government spy with a license not only to kill, but apparently to bomb Swiss mansions, destroy public restrooms, and commandeer everything from police horses to Harrier jets. He’s locked in a death struggle with the latest evil Arab terrorist, crazy Aziz (Art Malik), whose Crimson Jihad smuggles bombs into the U.S. inside priceless Persian art treasures, with slinky, amoral art dealer Juno (Tia Carrere) as their front.
Yet, for 15 years, Harry has been lying to his wife, Helen (Curtis), claiming to be a mild-mannered computer salesman. And she’s bought it.
Mild-mannered secret identities are as old as Clark Kent and Superman, but at least timid Clark wasn’t living with Lois Lane. And Lois was a lot more suspicious than Helen Tasker. Apparently, Helen finds Harry so dull, she never wonders why he’s late or what he’s doing. In their 15-year snooze of a marriage, he’s been such a brilliant actor, she’s convinced he’s a nice but boring schnook, incapable of even office amours.
The whole notion is bizarre, almost as if the moviemakers had decided to put James Thurber’s daydream classic “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” into reverse. Here, the daydreams are real and everyday life is a sham. Salesman Harry as he seems to be is just the kind of guy who usually dreams of being a superspy, a ladykiller, a terminator.
Harry is obviously modeled on James Bond. The first sequence of “True Lies,” supposedly set in a Swiss mansion and ending with a chase on skis, is Cameron’s version of an old-style Bond movie opening. But he’s 007 in the suburbs with June Cleaver, fondly calling “Honey, I’m home!” (What would the Terminator say? “Honey … I’ll be back?”) Then “reality” takes over: Harry and Helen are kidnapped by Aziz’ cabal of terrorists, trigger-happy oddballs who’ve gotten hold of four nuclear bombs.
“True Lies” is played as if it’s a lark, a big joke. But the movie only seems comfortable-and only really works-when it gets down to serious mayhem or sadism. Cutting to the chase is the whole guiding principle. Cameron wastes hardly any time establishing Harry’s home life, beyond a few quick scenes of Harry and Helen snuggling in bed or the family leaving in the morning for work and school.
Sadistic is the only word you could use for Harry’s crazed vendetta when he decides Helen is cuckolding him with a sleazy used car salesman named Simon (Bill Paxton)-who’s pretending to be a spy. Harry commandeers an Omega Sector squad (the secret government agency he works for), stalks Helen and Simon, tears down the wall of their trailer park rendezvous, terrorizes them while wearing a ski mask, and then coerces Helen into posing as a prostitute to regain the government’s good graces. (The resulting scene is also an excuse to get Jamie Lee Curtis out of her dowdy Helen clothes and into a torrid comic strip-tease, which at least shows that these moviemakers know what the audience wants.)
Incredibly, the whole stalking sequence is played as situation comedy; Harry’s pathology is supposed to be funny. (How could anyone but a bunch of bullies identify with this stuff?) The emotional climax comes when Harry, interrogating Helen anonymously behind a two-way mirror, his voice distorted into something that sounds like Darth Vader on Robitussin, demands she tell him whether she’s slept with Simon (she hasn’t) and whether she loves her husband (she does). His face goes soft; his buddy Gib pats him. This is what passes for a tender moment in the world of “True Lies.”
Tom Arnold is in the movie as Harry’s sidekick Gib-his best friend and partner spy, the guy who cracks jokes and knows what Harry is really like-and his function is crucial. He’s a kind of comic balancer. Without buddy-buddy Gib, the movie and Harry would seem even crazier, especially since Schwarzenegger’s face in repose still can look like a killing machine, blanched with fury.
The movie’s action scenes and spectacular last half hour show Cameron in his element: a slam-bang car, truck and helicopter chase on the Miami Keys ocean highway, followed by Harry in his Harrier jet crashing into buildings, and that wild cliffhanger with Harry, daughter Dana (Eliza Dushku) and evil Aziz. It would be unfair not to grant Cameron and company full credit for staging great, outrageous action scenes like these, though with an estimated $100 million at their disposal (about what it cost to make the seven-hour Soviet adaptation of “War and Peace” or a hundred “Citizen Kanes”), it would be shocking if they didn’t come up with a few good explosions and a massacre or two.
When Cameron opens and closes his movie with ballroom tango scenes, you know he’s reaching for high style. He’s a maker of sometimes wonderful high-energy thrillers, but he has a weakness for loony revenge stories. Cameron may have directed the “Terminators” and “The Abyss,” but he also wrote “Rambo.” And I’ve always felt the first “Terminator”-the movie where Schwarzenegger played a remorseless killer-robot-was the only one that truly worked well.
Here, the star’s gone full-circle. In “T2,” he played a nice killer robot, sacrificing himself for mankind. In “True Lies,” he’s Ozzie Nelson as James Bond, a killer robot who loves his family. Fittingly, his boss is Charlton Heston in a black eye patch and scar, looking like a patrician pirate.
“True Lies,” whose title is a deliberate oxymoron-a self- contradicting description-is something of a cinematic oxymoron, too. Its contradictions are innate: a nice bloody, sadistic family romp, full of hilarity, death and comical lunatics trying to blow up cities, all about a dad who’s a killer, a mom with a talent for striptease and whoring and a daughter who runs away with the key to the bomb.
Just folks? True lies? America in a crazy-house mirror? Cameron and Schwarzenegger probably don’t believe that. And they probably don’t believe the superman fantasies they’ve cooked up, either. Watching “True Lies,” it’s hard to believe they believe in much of anything-except cutting to the chase.
”TRUE LIES”
(STAR)(STAR) 1/2
Directed and written by James Cameron; photographed by Russell Carpenter; edited by Conrad Buff, Mark Goldblatt and Richard A. Harris; production designed by Peter Lamont; music by Brad Fiedel; produced by Cameron and Stephanie Austin. A 20th Century Fox release; opens Friday at Burnham Plaza, McClurg Court, Webster Place and outlying theaters. Running time: 2:15. MPAA rating: R. Language, sensuality, violence.
THE CAST
Harry Tasker…………………………………….Arnold Schwarzenegger
Helen Tasker…………………………………………Jamie Lee Curtis
Gib………………………………………………………Tom Arnold
Simon……………………………………………………Bill Paxton
Juno…………………………………………………….Tia Carrere
Aziz………………………………………………………Art Malik
