True Lies remains James Cameron's lightest, silliest, most controversial film

Long before Hollywood pioneer James Cameron solely dedicated himself to the world of Avatar and its upcoming installments slated for 2025, 2029, and 2031, he used to make what this critic passionately misses: original, stand-alone pictures. Or, in the case of sequels like Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Aliens (among the greatest sequels ever to follow their brilliant predecessors), installments that fully worked on their own, too. In other words, films that didn’t require a hefty amount of pre-viewing homework like so many movie universes demand today.

Mind you, I love both the technical and emotional register Cameron is in these days with his dazzling Avatar franchise—through it, he’s found himself a deeply emotional story of a family that he clearly (and disarmingly) adores, an evolving cinematic channel for his environmental and political anxieties and curiosities, and a futuristic playground ripe for his thirst for innovation, on the screen and off. But I can’t help it. I frequently wish he’d set Avatar aside for a bit, and give us another brilliant genre blend like Titanic—alongside T2, his finest achievement—another mystical excursion like The Abyss, or something that’s just fun and goofy and light on its feet, like True Lies, the frothiest and ironically, the most controversial title of his career.

As a lover of Cameron’s cinema, I’d often rather discuss any of his films other than True Lies, a boundlessly entertaining marital-spy comedy (like 2005’s Mr. And Mrs. Smith, which it reportedly inspired) that put Halloween final girl Jamie Lee Curtis and Arnold “The Terminator” Schwarzenegger on a glossy dance floor and watched them do the tango. And that’s because readings of the film during and since its release have, understandably, accused it of both misogyny (in its treatment of Curtis) and xenophobia (in its caricaturist portrayal of Arabs/Middle Easterners and Muslims). So being both a woman and a Turkish Muslim—in other words, being somewhat a part of both of the groups the film supposedly offends—I always feel the need to add a long list of apologetic caveats in defending my enjoyment of this ‘90s action staple and artifact, which opened the same summer as Speed and became one of 1994’s top grossers. (Action fans such as myself didn’t know how good we had it back then.)

In truth, I find the aims taken at the film for its depiction of women mostly wrong-footed, though, yes, its view of Arabs and Middle Easterners is indeed an unfortunately cringeworthy and harmful headscratcher—but even that entails some context. (More on both of these later.) Yet, the main reason True Lies still manages to entertain and awe today is its design. In that, it is a kind of film they don’t make anymore: an action escapade that takes itself just seriously enough, but never too seriously, in a genre that even turned the fizzy and agile James Bond into a sad and brooding character over the last couple of decades, and equated an exhausting darkening of mood in action with “brainy” and “grown-up.”

Mercifully, a ‘90s Hollywood action extravaganza like True Lies didn’t have any interest in the looming high-brow gloominess. Its knowing and purposeful light-heartedness allows True Lies (loosely inspired by the underseen French comedy La Totale!) to still hit a sweet spot at the intersection of technical finesse, an outlandishly high-concept story committed to taking the audience on a high-wire adventure, and enough brains to hold the affair together amid the cheesy wisecracks. (In True Lies, the cheesiest of them all is “You’re fired,” spoken by Arnie to a terrorist before he gets, ahem, fired on a Harrier missile.)

And even its technical wizardry—the sum of which earned True Lies “the most expensive movie ever made” badge at $100M in 1994—doesn’t needlessly hit one on the head with its brilliance, but makes every one of its innovations narratively count across set pieces that see Curtis dangle from a helicopter over the Florida Keys (among the most famous images of the ‘90s) and Schwarzenegger fly a jet, held onto dear life by Eliza Dushku, who plays his teenage daughter Dana.

True Lies is about the trio’s D.C.-based family, the Taskers. Helen (Curtis) is a bored legal secretary with an often absent husband, Harry (Schwarzenegger), whom she believes to be a totally boring, distracted, and square software salesman, attending industry conferences around the country and working overtime. In reality, Harry is a top Mission: Impossible-type spy, trotting around the globe and killing all the bad guys. The toughest mission of his life finds him when he’s already in the middle of a perilous scheme: Trying to nail terrorist Aziz (Art Malik) and his shady art dealer Juno Skinner (Tia Carrere) in order to track down the nuclear missiles that Aziz and his “Crimson Jihad” collective possesses. That secondary tough mission? To earn back the affection of Helen, who is so bored that she might just cheat on Harry with the mysterious Simon (Bill Paxton, hilarious), a sleazy loser who poses as a spy, but is in fact a secondhand car salesman, using his schtick to sleep with unsuspecting women. Harry pledges to stop Simon at all costs in an unsavory operation where he’d still hide his identity from Helen.

One can argue that as an intelligent woman, Helen would never fall for the lies of someone as amateurish as Simon, and True Lies sells her smarts short in that regard. But that would be missing the big picture, as the entire premise of the film asks you to believe something even more impossible: that Harry successfully lied to his family for over a decade and got away with it. Considering this, Helen nearly falling for Simon doesn’t quite land like an insult to her, but as harmless mischief in a film full of such hijinks, starting with a premise that, by design, requires a huge amount of abandonment of disbelief. Also, Helen is no damsel in distress, regardless of what anyone says. Before Harry and his special ops friend Gib (Tom Arnold) come to her “rescue,” Helen already manages to save herself from Simon.

The biggest accusation of misogyny True Lies continues to face is due to a scene where Helen strips for a man she believes to be an arms dealer—in reality, it’s Harry, who secretly invents a fake mission for Helen to give her the adventure she’s been looking for. Unknowingly, Helen dances for the man hiding in the shadows, removing her gloriously ‘90s, square-neck bodycon dress (which she transforms in the previous scene by ripping apart all its unsexy frills in a brilliant costume design moment), exposing her sexy underwear and clumsy dance moves that slowly become more erotic and sensual.

Is the scene humiliating for Helen? For Jamie Lee Curtis? Not according to this critic, who loves to see this unfairly sidelined woman connect with the sexual powers that she must have always possessed (if the uncharacteristically racy underwear she owns is any indication). And not according to New York Times critic Janet Maslin. “The scene has the potential to seem unpleasantly exploitative, but Ms. Curtis is much too deft a comedian to let that happen,” Maslin wrote in 1994. “And her own enjoyment of the moment comes through so clearly that the audience can enjoy it, too.” Caryn James, another NYT critic, agreed. “Just when you’re amazed that she has made herself so convincingly drab as Helen, she is transformed,” she wrote. “When she starts dancing, in little black undergarments that are hardly what she would have been wearing beneath that matronly dress, you can give the movie some leeway. Despite appearances, from that point on Helen is more than the hero’s sexual sidekick. She is at least as crucial to the plot—saving America from terrorists with a nuclear bomb—as Harry.” According to Rebecca Keegan’s excellent book The Futurist: The Life And Films Of James Cameron, Anne Thompson (writing for Entertainment Weekly at the time) said, “Jamie Lee’s character was empowered by tapping into her sexuality in a way that she hadn’t been doing in her marriage. She managed to pull it off in a way that was not at all icky for me.”

There were (and are), of course, detractors of the scene, many of them men. But if I may, it’s always a little strange (sometimes infuriating) for women when men, however well-meaning, tell us what’s feminist versus what’s not—what we should be offended by versus not—as if our experiences are secondary to their second-hand observations. And there is a lot of lived-in validity in these aforementioned voices in their collective praise of Curtis’ performance, which is among the film’s greatest assets. It’s thanks to that transformation that, when the end of True Lies tasks the duo as dual spies (Maslin likens them to the Nick and Nora of the Thin Man series) with another globetrotting adventure, the fulfillment we feel is well-earned—even, yes, feminist.

Though this open-ended conclusion signaled a sequel, Cameron never followed up True Lies with a new chapter. According to Keegan’s book, he got put off by the idea post-9/11, saying, “Somehow, having fun with nuke-toting terrorists just didn’t sit as well as it had.” Still, who knows why it had ever sat well with Cameron to play around with terrorism and Islamic stereotypes as cartoonishly as he did. There is one character of Middle Eastern descent on the side of “the good guys”—Faisil, played by Grant Heslov—but his presence is not enough to balance the books. Perhaps, being a post-Gulf War and pre-9/11 entry, when terrorism was both a current topic and not as top of mind as it would become for Americans, harmful stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims didn’t seem like a big deal, and Cameron tried to offset those lapses in judgment with the film’s comedic, unrealistic tone. But the film was rightfully met by protests by a coalition of Arab-American organizations, almost exactly one year after the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) had the lyrics to Aladdin’s “Arabian Nights” song changed. (The song’s former lyrics referred to Arabs as people who “cut off your ear if they don’t like your face.”)

Revisiting it recently, I was mostly shocked by the fact that True Lies hasn’t lost an ounce of its compulsive watchability despite the film’s unfortunate handling of these harmful stereotypes. Its charm, buoyancy, and technical finesse hasn’t aged a day. In fact, maybe with the Mission: Impossible movies excepted (I do bet Fallout owes its bathroom fight sequence to True Lies), it still runs circles around many an action film today with its coherence, sense of humor, and commitment to old-school entertainment. How significant would it be if Cameron indeed made room for something like True Lies again, written and designed for this side of the 21st century?