'True Lies': A Look Back at 1994 — The Best Year Ever

At least as far as movies go, I believe the above headline to be accurate. The Best Picture nominees at the Oscars that year were Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Quiz Show, and The Shawshank Redemption. In this series, I will look back at the Best Year Ever, cleverly focusing on a different movie each week. Starting with…

The key to any great year at the movies is a great summer at the movies, and 1994 had that. I can’t personally decide which movie that summer was my favorite, so I’m starting with my wife’s favorite. My wife grew up in a small town in South Georgia. They didn’t have a movie theatre. Not that she was in the stone ages, but going to a movie was, to her, an event, not a regular occurrence. We had been dating for only about a month, when one Tuesday afternoon in December of 1991, I said, “Hey, let’s go to the movies.” Puzzled, she replied, “It’s Tuesday.”

As good a day as any, I replied, before whisking her off to see “The Last Boy Scout.”

Three years later, she was worse than me. We would watch two movies in an afternoon, three if they weren’t playing at the General Cinema theatre, with its uncomfortable red seats. Our tastes were not discriminating, we would see anything. On July 15, 1994, we went to see Disney’s Angels in the Outfield (co-starring Matthew McConaughey and Adrien Brody!), then ducked into the next auditorium to watch True Lies. My wife saw it at least ten times that summer.

Proving that some things don’t change for Cameron, it was at the time the most expensive movie ever made. It cost a reported $100 million, a sum for which you can now make the first act of a summer movie. Every dollar is up on the screen in this gloriously self-aware action comedy. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s about a spy who believes that his wife is cheating on him. Taking time off from saving the world from Nazis and Muslim terrorists, he sets a trap to catch her in the act, which inadvertently drags her into the world of international espionage and terrorism.

Has it stood the test of time? I think so. The scene where Schwarzenegger, under the influence of truth serum, tells a roomful of terrorists how he’s going to dispatch each and every one of them only moments before he dispatches every single one of them is alone worth the price of a rental. The acting is solid, Curtis is great, Tom Arnold is surprisingly good, future Clooney collaborator Grant Heslov is funny, and no one can out-Ahnuld Ahnuld.

Culturally, I think it’s a relevant piece of work because of the controversy it inspired. With True Lies, Cameron came under heavy criticism for depicting Arabs as terrorists. Whenever a group complains about their depiction in a movie, I always side with the movie. At no point in True Lies did I think the as yet to be anointed King of the World was making any sort of comment on all Arabs or all Muslims. Two years earlier, Muslim terrorists had attacked the World Trade Center. Seven years later, Muslim terrorists would again attack the World Trade Center. And a year after that, Hollywood officially caved to the demands of politically correct Muslims by changing the bad guys in a Tom Clancy movie from Muslim terrorists to Nazi terrorists.

True Lies was also called misogynist at the time, due in large part to the trap set by Schwarzenegger to catch his wife cheating – he forces her to strip. All in all, Cameron got beat up pretty bad on this one, and had no rewards or box office titles to show for it. It made nearly a hundred fifty million domestically, almost four hundred million globally – but this was before anyone gave a rip about the global box office. Domestic was all that mattered, and True Lies was certainly no bomb, but it was not a humongous success, either.

Where does True Lies fit in the canon of Cameron’s work? It’s not his best movie, but it’s not his worst either – although I wouldn’t even call my least favorite of his movies a bad movie. But I think that as gifted as he certainly is, he is a cynical kid, eager for recognition and acceptance, and I believe that the criticism from the cultural elite stung him badly. The misogyny angle really had to stick in the craw of the guy who gave us badass Sarah Connor. The hero of his next movie, Titanic, was a little guy, a poor street urchin slash artist, who was paired with a female protagonist who willingly strips naked for him. The villains were greedy and rich and free of ethnicity. Result: jackpot, baby! No one that I can recall rushed to his defense in the wake of his perceived racism and misogyny in 1994. Cut to Avatar, 2009: in the wake of criticism from the right, the cultural elite had his back.

Ultimately, True Lies exists as a bridge between Cameron’s Terminator/Aliens phase, and his King of the World status. Nothing in the movie gives the impression that he feels he has anything to prove, so in that sense, it’s a pretty honest piece of work. He only means to entertain, doesn’t care about preaching to us, and that’s a good thing.

Hope you’ll come back next week for my ruminations on Hoop Dreams. I’m not sure what ruminations means, but it sounds appropriately pretentious.