The Riskiest Spy Movie of the ‘90s is At Its Best When It’s a Bond Riff

One year before the James Bond franchise made a major comeback with Pierce Brosnan’s GoldenEye, James Cameron decided to turn Arnold Schwarzenegger into a secret agent in True Lies. Just two years after Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the idea of selling Arnold to audiences as a kind of tongue-in-cheek 007 figure was risky as hell. In the days before the first Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible, and on the eve of Bond’s comeback in the Brosnan-era, an espionage action movie of this type wasn’t necessarily a slam-dunk. But, what made True Lies click was that it wasn’t a straight-up Bond knock-off. Instead — riffing off of a French film called La Totale! — Cameron took an over-the-top spy movie and turned it, partially, into a rom-com.

Thirty years after its release on July 15, 1994, True Lies remains a just-okay romantic comedy, but interestingly, it holds up extremely well as the movie genre it was partially lampooning. In doing a meta-textual take on a spy thriller, the legacy of True Lies is that it remains a pretty good Bond-esque action movie, even when it's joking around.

True Lies opens with special agent Harry Tasker (Schwarzenegger) on a very Bond-like mission to infiltrate a bad guy party, which begins with him snorkeling in a wetsuit, and ends in him wearing a tux and dancing the tango with Tia Carrere. After his very over-the-top spy mission is complete, we learn that Harry is also a happily married family man, with a wife named Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis) and a tween daughter named Dana (Eliza Dushku). Right away, you can tell where this is going: Tasker’s family has no idea he’s really a secret agent, which means that the entire movie is going to end up being about Harry and Dana getting into a massive adventure together as a married couple.

Here’s the thing: The romantic comedy elements of the movie, and the revelations that Harry is really a super-spy and that his wife is really bored with her day-to-day life are the aspects of the movie that have aged poorly. While it may have been cute in 1994 for Harry to gaslight his wife even more by setting up a fake spy mission, none of this plays well now. We’re not supposed to take anything truly seriously in True Lies, but there is an element of real action-movie danger here. This isn’t a true comedy, and on some level, we’re supposed to believe that something bad could happen to Harry and Dana. This kind of mash-up worked well in 1990’s Kindergarten Cop, the true breakthrough movie where everyone realized that Arnold being hilarious in 1988’s Twins wasn’t a fluke.

But, strangely, because the comedy of True Lies relies too much on sexist tropes rather than, say, clever writing, the movie does better when it’s just trying to be an action movie that just happens to feature a married couple. Cameron is at the height of his action-movie powers with this one, and, after his success on T2 was continuing to dabble in blending CGI effects with practical ones. That said, a lot of the famous climaxes of the movie — in which Schwarzenegger performs some precision flying with a Harrier Fighter Jet, was accomplished largely with real actors, real props, and real stunts.

And it’s in this way that True Lies has to be considered an interesting study if you like or care about action movies at all. It’s not just Cameron’s emerging prowess with VFX, the other reason why the movie looks pretty slick is that the production designer on this film was, Peter Lamont. Before and after True Lies, Lamont’s career was dominated by his very specific style of design on 18 James Bond films, from Sean Connery’s third film, Goldfinger (1964) to Daniel Craig’s first, Casino Royale (2006). Starting with the opening sequence at the party to the massive set pieces at the end of the film, True Lies carries a veneer of plausibility fused perfectly with fantastical stakes. Things look taller, and bigger in movies designed by Peter Lamont, which is partly why the Bond films were so successful.

In the credits of James Bond movies, there’s always a promise he’ll return. With Schwarzenegger’s Harry Tasker, there was no promise that he’d “be back,” which, in some ways is a shame. Back in the day, there was talk of turning this into a franchise, but Cameron made Titanic next, and then, in 2001, everyone involved lost their appetite for this kind of action movie after September 11th.

So, while True Lies has a lot of sexist ‘90s baggage, and some not-so-great stereotypes about Islamic terrorists, the best way to view it is like an off-day for a James Bond movie. The combination of James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Peter Lamont proved to be a successful one, and if True Lies hadn’t already been made by 1994, it’s possible that the success of GoldenEye in 1995 would have prevented it from becoming a hit when it did. Luckily, sometimes, when there’s a Bond gap, great action films can emerge.

True Lies is streaming on Hulu.