True Lies


True Lies is a 1994 American action comedy film written and directed by James Cameron. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as Harry Tasker, a U.S. government agent, who struggles to balance his double life as a spy with his familial duties, and Jamie Lee Curtis as his unknowing wife. Tom Arnold, Bill Paxton, Art Malik, Tia Carrere, Eliza Dushku, and Charlton Heston star in supporting roles. The screenplay is based on the 1991 French comedy film La Totale!.
The film was the first Lightstorm Entertainment project to be distributed under Cameron's multimillion-dollar production deal with 20th Century Fox, as well as the first major production for the visual effects company Digital Domain, which was co-founded by Cameron. It was also the first film to cost $100 million.
True Lies received mostly positive reviews from critics, and ultimately grossed $378 million worldwide at the box office, becoming the third-highest-grossing film of 1994. For her performance, Curtis won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy and the Saturn Award for Best Actress, while Cameron won the Saturn Award for Best Director. It was also nominated at the Academy Awards and BAFTAs in the Best Visual Effects category, and also for seven Saturn Awards. A streaming television series adaptation premiered in 2023.
A 2004 ruling by the Court of Appeal of Paris found that True Lies and La Totale! were plagiarized from an unproduced 1981 screenplay, Émilie, by Lucien Lambert.

Plot

Harry Tasker, to the knowledge of his wife Helen and his daughter Dana, is a mild-mannered computer hardware salesman often away on business trips. In reality he works for Omega Sector, a top-secret U.S. counterterrorism agency. Harry, aided by his teammates Albert "Gib" Gibson and Faisil, infiltrates a party in Switzerland hosted by billionaire Jamal Khaled. At the party, Harry approaches Khaled's art dealer Juno Skinner, who is also a paid agent of "Crimson Jihad", a terrorist organization led by Salim Abu Aziz.
Posing as a potential art buyer, Harry visits Juno, leading the terrorists to attempt to kill him. Harry fights them off but loses Aziz in a pursuit. As a result, Harry misses the birthday party that Helen and Dana planned for him. The next day, Harry goes to Helen's office to reconcile with her, but instead overhears her secretly arranging to meet someone called Simon.
Suspecting Helen is having an affair, Harry uses Omega Sector resources to learn that Simon is a used car salesman, who pretends to be a spy to seduce women. In disguise, Harry and other Omega agents arrest Helen and Simon. After terrifying Simon into keeping away from Helen, Harry and Gib interrogate her while hiding their identities. They learn she is suffering a midlife crisis and is desperately seeking adventure. They arrange for Helen to participate in a staged spy mission, where she is to seduce a mysterious figure and plant a bug in his hotel room. As the fake mission proceeds, Aziz's men burst in and capture Helen and Harry.
The couple are taken to an island in the Florida Keys, where Helen learns of Harry's double life. Harry learns Juno had managed to smuggle four MIRV nuclear warheads by hiding them in fake antique statues. Aziz sends a message threatening to detonate warheads in major cities unless the U.S. government removes their forces from the Persian Gulf. He starts a timer to detonate one warhead on an uninhabited island as a demonstration.
Harry breaks out of his restraints and kills his would-be torturers. The couple learn that one warhead is set to explode in 90 minutes while the others are loaded onto vehicles to be taken into the mainland via the Overseas Highway, bypassing U.S. Customs. In the ensuing melee, Harry and Helen kill many of the terrorists, but their main convoy drive off with two warheads, while Aziz carries one on a helicopter. Helen is caught by Juno and taken in a limousine following the convoy.
Gib and other Omega agents pick up Harry. Two Marine Harrier jump jets destroy part of the Seven Mile Bridge, intercepting the convoy. Hanging from a helicopter, Harry rescues Helen from the limo before it falls off the bridge, killing Juno. The warhead left on the island detonates without killing anyone.
Harry discovers that Aziz and his men are holding Dana hostage in a Miami skyscraper and are threatening to detonate their last warhead. Harry commandeers one of the jets to rescue her. Faisil gets into the building by posing as a news cameraman. Dana steals the missile control key and flees to the roof, while Faisil kills several of Aziz's men. Aziz pursues Dana onto a tower crane, and then Harry arrives. Harry rescues Dana, and after a struggle with Aziz, he has him ensnared on the end of one of the plane's missiles, which Harry fires at a terrorist helicopter, killing Aziz and the remnants of Crimson Jihad. Harry, Helen and Dana are safely reunited.
A year later, Harry and Helen are working together as Omega agents. While on a mission at a formal party, they encounter Simon, working as a waiter and pretending to be a spy. Simon runs away in fear after they reveal themselves and threaten to kill him to avoid jeopardizing their covers. Harry and Helen dance the tango, while Gib pleads for them to take their work seriously.

Cast

Production

Arnold Schwarzenegger stated that while filming a scene with a horse, a camera boom hit the horse and "it went crazy, spinning and rearing" near a drop of. Schwarzenegger quickly slid off the horse and a stuntman caught him; he concluded, " why I will always love stunt people". Art Malik said he was drawn to the script's "pantomime quality" and the chance to work with director James Cameron. Costing $100–120 million to produce, True Lies was the first film with a production budget of over $100 million. It was filmed over a seven-month schedule.
Of the many locations that were used in the film, the Rosecliff Mansion was used for the ballroom tango scenes in the beginning of the film and the exterior of the Swiss chalet that Harry Tasker infiltrates is Ochre Court. The ballroom dancing scene that closes the film, as well as the scenes in the lobby of the fictional Hotel Marquis in Washington, take place in the Crystal Ballroom of the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The outdoor structures used by Aziz's smuggling ring as a base of operations were a series of custom made Alaska Structures fabric buildings, leased to the production crew during filming.
It was during the production of True Lies in 1993 when Cameron would also first meet his future Titanic and Avatar film series co-producer Jon Landau, who Cameron stated in July 2024 was "the studio 'suit' assigned to oversee True Lies." In the time following the production of True Lies, Landau would leave Fox to join Cameron's production company Lightstorm.

Joel Kramer sexual misconduct allegation

In 2018, Eliza Dushku alleged that while filming True Lies at the age of twelve, she was sexually molested by the film's stunt coordinator, Joel Kramer. According to Dushku, soon after that, an adult friend of hers confronted Kramer on set, and that same day, Dushku was injured during a stunt and several of her ribs were broken, while Kramer was responsible for her safety. Dushku's co-stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, and director James Cameron all voiced support and admiration for Dushku's bravery. Kramer has denied the accusation of sexual misconduct.

Music

True Lies was the first film to use the 1994 20th Century Fox logo and fanfare adapted and conducted by Bruce Broughton.

Soundtrack

Songs appearing in the film not included on the soundtrack album:

Box office

True Lies was a box-office success. Opening in 2,368 theaters in the United States and Canada, it ranked number one at the US box office in its opening weekend, grossing $25,869,770 and beating Forrest Gump. Once Forrest Gump returned to the top of the box office the following week, True Lies dropped into second place, grossing $20.7 million. It set a record opening weekend in South Korea with a gross of $995,023. It also had a record opening weekend in Japan for distributor Nippon Herald with a gross of $3 million and was number one at the Japanese box office for twelve straight weeks. True Lies was the second major American film to be released in China since The Fugitive and generated a total of, becoming the country's highest-grossing Hollywood film. The film also became the highest-grossing film of all time in the Philippines. True Lies went on to gross $146,282,411 in the United States and Canada and $232,600,000 in the rest of world, totaling $378,882,411 worldwide, making it the third-highest-grossing film of 1994, behind The Lion King and Forrest Gump.

Critical reception

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 77% based on 135 reviews. The website's critical consensus reads, "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". On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 63 out of 100 based on reviews from 17 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four, writing, "It's stuff like that we go to Arnold Schwarzenegger movies for, and True Lies has a lot of it: laugh-out-loud moments when the violence is so cartoonish we don't take it seriously, and yet are amazed at its inventiveness and audacity." He wrote that he found the plot "perfunctory", but praised the film's stunts and special effects. In a two out of five rating, Bob Fenster of The Arizona Republic stated that "True Lies isn't as bad as Last Action Hero, but it's not half as hot as Speed."
The film received criticism for its portrayal of Middle Easterners and its treatment of female characters. John Simon of the National Review criticized the plot line of the hero character using his agency's resources to stalk and frighten his wife as cruel and misogynistic. In a negative review, Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times wrote:
Some Arabs and Muslims perceived the film as conveying strong anti-Arab or anti-Muslim prejudice, with some Arab-American advocacy groups calling for its banning in Arab countries.
In a 2022 retrospective review, Polish writer Jacek Szafranowicz called the film "a masterpiece of cinematic fun", noting that the collaboration between the director and its main star "deserves a golden medal". Commenting on the state of blockbuster films, Scott Tobias of The Guardian and The A.V. Club wrote, "True Lies is the strange case of a film that's alternately retrograde, forward-looking, and thoroughly of its time. For better or worse, it's a marker of how the Hollywood action blockbuster had advanced in 1994, as well as a commentary on the troubled state of American masculinity, marital relationships, and lingering racial attitudes."