True Lies

James Cameron remains one of the most ambitious filmmakers working today and has made many highly successful films that boast top-tier entertainment. Ten years after finding success with The Terminator, and three years after Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Cameron reunited with Arnold Schwarzenegger for True Lies in 1994. Having made a number of sci-fi action films, this would be Cameron's first straightforward action adventure flick without any time travel or aliens to be seen of. 

The story follows Schwarzenegger's secret agent, Harry Tasker, who is nothing more than a computer salesman to his wife and daughter. Little do they know that he lives a James Bond-esque career involving action and espionage but his supposedly dull life has left his wife feeling unhappy about their marriage. While Tasker is busy trying to foil a terrorist operation involving nuclear weapons, he starts to realise his marriage has been suffering at the expense of his work while his wife is lured into an exciting mission of her own. 

Setup as an action comedy of sorts, Cameron's commitment to a large scale experience is a lot of fun to watch but an underdeveloped antagonist and the comedy aspects falling flat most of the time left this feeling like one of Cameron's weaker efforts. Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis are still good fun together, particularly in the third act when the drama comes to a head but it's all so light and forgettable.

I still can't deny that the action will still provide plenty of entertainment as Cameron captures much of it in camera, making it unfortunate that his Avatar films occupy all his time as he crafts new CGI landscapes. He's always been fascinated in pushing technology further and I reckon something like this wouldn't be of interest to him today. However, he was planning to make a sequel in the late 1990s but being busy with Titanic caused delays and then the 9/11 attacks made him decide another light-hearted action film involving terrorists was no longer appropriate so the finalised script was locked away.

True Lies isn't the perfect Schwarzenegger action flick but it is still a lot of fun if you can overlook the lull in the second act of this 140 minute extravaganza. It just isn't everything it could be and feels underbaked in terms of its premise but for some expensive background entertainment, you could do a lot worse.