James Cameron’s spy comedy has inventive action and a comic cast worth staying for. But the long marital detour is frequently cruel, and Jamie Lee Curtis has to work harder than she should to make it funny.
True Lies is worth considering for its action and its comic cast, provided we can tolerate a long, sour detour through marital jealousy. James Cameron directs and writes a spy thriller that keeps making room for domestic farce, with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Harry at the centre of both. The mixture gives the film opportunities to be ridiculous without pretending otherwise. It also gives Cameron more to manage than his screenplay can comfortably contain, especially across 141 minutes.
Schwarzenegger is useful here because his seriousness can become funny without much visible adjustment. He does not need to signal every joke, and the film benefits whenever he lets someone else provide it. Tom Arnold, playing Gib, has the timing to make the comedy feel less laboured than the elaborate business around him. We laughed at the impatience in his delivery; he sounds as though even this company could waste someone’s afternoon.
Russell Carpenter’s cinematography helps the chases by making their scale readable, rather than merely making everything look busy. We can appreciate the danger and the absurdity without having to stop and work out what the film is showing us. Peter Lamont’s production design helps make the mayhem convincing: the spaces feel substantial even when the action inside them becomes ridiculous. That clarity lets a chase be funny without making the danger cease to matter.
The editing by Richard A. Harris, Mark Goldblatt and Conrad Buff IV is more convincing within individual action sequences than across the film as a whole. The chases have purpose and momentum; the middle section takes too long to get through its marital suspicions. Brad Fiedel’s score adds drive, though we remember little of it once the action stops. There is enough invention in the action to earn patience, but not all the domestic material deserves the time it receives.
Cameron’s screenplay makes the marital dispute harder to enjoy than it needs to be. It repeatedly treats the humiliating treatment of a woman as a comic opportunity, then asks the marriage to matter to us. We became uncomfortable watching Helen made the object of that amusement, because the joke depends so heavily on her being at a disadvantage. The film’s self-mockery does not excuse this, and its breeziness makes the cruelty feel more casual.
Jamie Lee Curtis gives Helen enough comic authority to keep that stretch from becoming intolerable. Her performance has a willingness to look foolish that the writing does not always repay, and she gets laughs without making the character seem empty. That matters in a film whose attitude towards relationships can be so crude. She makes the marriage worth some attention even when the screenplay is doing its best to make us wish the action would resume.
Action-comedy usually needs us to like the people who are having such an unreasonable day. It can accommodate vanity, stupidity and bad behaviour, but Cameron takes too much pleasure in punishment for this to be entirely carefree entertainment. The problem is especially noticeable because the action so often gets the balance of danger and amusement right. Try it for the chases and for Curtis, with fair warning that the marriage takes longer than the jokes deserve.
