If it doesn't reach the heights of director James Cameron's and star Arnold Schwarzenegger's previous collaborations, True Lies still packs enough action and humor into its sometimes absurd plot to entertain.
If it doesn't reach the heights of director James Cameron's and star Arnold Schwarzenegger's previous collaborations, True Lies still packs enough action and humor into its sometimes absurd plot to entertain.
Borrowing liberally from the French film La Totale, this is an action picture, domestic comedy, and political thriller rolled into a crowd-pleasing ball of entertainment. Producer James Cameron wrote and directed the film. Henry Tasker (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a workaholic computer salesman neglecting his mousy wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), a legal secretary. Simon (Bill Paxton) seduces Helen with the lie that he is a secret agent; he's really a used car salesman. Harry suspects that Helen is
cheating on him, and he sends a few colleagues to kidnap them. Helen then discovers that Harry is a secret agent by night, working for a shadowy group called the Omega Sector. Harry and his partner Gib (Tom Arnold) are trying to find four nuclear warheads that have disappeared from a former Soviet republic. ~ Michael Betzold, Rovi
Providing its share of fun in stretches, pic ultimately overstays its welcome with a level of mayhem that will simply feel like too much for any marginal fan of the genre.
However high your ranking on the culture scale, I defy you to watch this and leave the theatre without a whistled 'Wow' followed by a grudging 'That's entertainment.'
This mixture of comedy and super-agent spectacle works well at first. But when Schwarzenegger's family and working worlds link up -- an inevitable development -- the plot becomes increasingly ridiculous and overwrought.
Though not as irksome and irritating as Schwarzenegger's Last Action Hero, this James Cameron actioner is more of a big technical machine than a story which is senseless.
Half the time, this hi-tech action movie delivers, in a mindless kind of way: it's fast, crude and has enough explosions and cartoon-style violence to satisfy our baser instincts.
Though it holds many cliche's, "True Lies" entertainingly embraces the B action-movie tone of the 90's. It's a lot of fun; the action is in your face. "True Lies" knows what it wants to be: stupid, entertaining, and cheesy and it does it excellently.
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