Flasz On Film

When True Lies premiered in the summer of 1994, it immediately became a box office success, which isn’t surprising at all. Between Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron still riding their post-T2 wave (with the former temporarily stumbling with the poorly received cult classic Last Action Hero, which he saw as the stake through the heart of his acting career at least for a few minutes), it was a surefire juggernaut. It became the third highest-grossing movie worldwide in its year and—at least for a little while—it staved off the impending downturn in Arnold’s acting career. 

On that latter note, though, True Lies consolidated what I see as a transition within the parameters of action filmmaking as it embraced Arnold’s character, Harry Tasker, as more than a ruthless killing machine slinging one-liners and dispatching baddies with his top off. Arnold’s character was no longer an 80s action man, but more so a post-Die Hard evolution of this archetype. Still a superhero with a body of a Greek god and a skill set of James Bond… but also a family man.  

What makes True Lies a special movie and an enduring classic I grow fonder of with each passing year—and only since relatively recently have I had the opportunity to watch it in “proper” high definition (forgetting about the DNR and colour timing issues)—isn’t necessarily the spectacle in itself, but rather how it invites me to live vicariously through Harry Tasker. After all, he’s no longer a killing machine sent from the future or even a John Matrix-type on a mission to save his little daughter while ruining a fictitious banana republic of Val Verde. He represents something else thanks to one simple aspect of his character. Arnold’s Harry has a wife, a daughter, a dog, a house, a mortgage and everything else that goes with the concept of having a family. He is a what-if-James-Bond-had-a-family-but-he-told-them-he-sells-computers-or-something. At home Harry is a boring salesman who puts his wife (Jamie Lee Curtis) to sleep in three seconds when he’s asked to tell her about his day at work and whose daughter Dana (Eliza Dushku) thinks he’s lame.  Not the suave sharpshooting tango extraordinnaire he is during office hours.

And here I am suggesting that many middle-aged men with professional careers would be able to identify with at least this aspect of the movie. We all know what it feels like to have a family like Harry: a partner who rolls her eyes at the brief mention of how our day went and children who simply think we are too old to be cool anymore. Wouldn’t it be something if we could imagine that when we get up at six in the morning and rush out the door having barely finished our coffee, we wouldn’t be driving to the office our families think we work at? Wouldn’t it be cool if the office building we work at had a secret passage where we have to identify ourselves to Janice, a perfectly innocuous-looking secretary who keeps a finger on the trigger of a massive silver Desert Eagle pocket cannon? Wouldn’t it be awesome if our work meetings were chaired by a one-eyed Charlton Heston-type who, instead of trying to stay awake as we talk through our corporate slide decks, would quiz us on our latest assignment in Switzerland and the mayhem we unleashed when our covers were blown?  

True Lies is that what-if daydream where we—middle-aged guys with families and careers in tow, desperately trying to keep our heads above water as the world seemingly crumbles around us time after time (Je suis Witwicky; if you know, you know)—get to close our eyes and pretend for nearly two and a half hours that we, too, could be a superspy. Also, and this is key here, that an adventure would ensue one day which would allow our partners and children to see us how we’d like to be seen—as real-life superheroes capable of flying Harrier jets, riding horses indoors, swinging from helicopters, breaking people’s necks and setting baddies ablaze by the dozen.  

In fairness, James Cameron’s movie is a reflection of a cross-generational cry for appreciation on behalf of dads and husbands who tirelessly put food on the table, fix stuff around the house, leave before everyone is awake and come back from work when people are already fast asleep or at the very best winding down and getting ready for bed. It’s a gentle wink at a possibility that your dad when he’s out there working his ass off at a job you might find lame and totally uncool and corporate and stuff, might actually be slaying dragons, which is how you may have seen him when you were too little to remember.  

This movie is a yearning, an expression of long-suppressed need for attention and appreciation. A fantasy allowing us to live the dreams we have carried in our chest, unrealized because we didn’t have the guts to make the right decisions when it mattered, or maybe because we didn’t have the skills or fortitude to succeed when we had our shot, or maybe because we didn’t have the lucidity to notice when we did have that shot. It’s a daydream for dads trapped in lives of quiet desperation, whose windows of opportunity to make bold moves have shut indefinitely. At least we have this movie to live vicariously through. Which I think is a result of conscious narrative design.  

After all, especially at the time of its release it was difficult to find an action movie riding the line between bombastic exceptionalism and intrinsic relatability as effortlessly as this one. It married the superhero ethos of the 80s actioners Arnie helped to define with the everyman likability of John McClane to forge an utterly unforgettable, non-stop rollercoaster ride which brings the regular Joe Bloggs into the world of superspies as much as it drags the universe of superspies into the realm of everyday dads. And it all begins with a simple (semi)cold open strategy aimed at first dragging this aforementioned dad from his sofa into the movie.  

Boom. Brad Fiedel’s music blares through the speakers. Lightstorm Entertainment. You know you’re in good hands. Boom. That shifting title. True. Right turn. Lies. Boom. And we’re in Switzerland at a party. Armed guards are checking people’s invitations. Meanwhile, Arnie is infiltrating the compound, turns his diver’s suit into a tux, pats some cologne into his cheeks and he’s ready to tango. You’re in. This age-old James Bond strategy works for a good reason. In media res magic is what hooks you.  

But what keeps you in comes ten minutes later. After Arnie shoots two dozen armed skiers and everyone drives off into the night, we cut to domestic Harry. He comes back home from his mission, puts his wedding ring back on, takes a shower and goes to bed. His wife rolls over to snuggle up to him and they both fall asleep, like a normal married couple. Which is where you begin to daydream because this bit you recognize very well. You can easily slide yourself into Arnold’s shoes at this point, which isn’t something you could do with any of his other characters. Can you be Dutch from Predator? Doubt it. You most certainly wouldn’t be Conan. But somehow, Harry Tasker’s character is written in such a convincingly scaled-down way that you could just about see yourself in his shoes. Granted, Arnold’s physique makes him look like Christopher Reeve’s Clark Kent pretending to be a journalist; and in fact, this character functions in a symmetrical way to Superman. Arnold barely fits in a suit as he pretends to be a normie. But we buy it because the family dynamic in the movie sells it perfectly. 

I suppose this is a tacit acknowledgement of the stunning character work on behalf of Jamie Lee Curtis who plays Harry’s wife Helen, bored with her domestic life and, most importantly, neglected by her overworked husband. This is again a recognizable melody for many of us because we too wish we could spend more time with our spouses and partners, while the hunter-gatherer instincts keep us away from home. Because bills won’t pay themselves and at least at work we stand a chance of receiving some form of appreciation… while we secretly crave the respect of those we leave behind. A paradoxically cruel stalemate fleshed out so beautifully by the interplay between the seemingly listless and totally unassuming Harry (if you disregard his pronounced chest and girthy bicep ) and the domesticated queen hiding a lot of sass and a solid right jab behind her ostensibly frazzled demeanour.  

As a result, everything that follows in the movie feels ever so slightly more real because it is all tethered to concepts you would easily identify, and problems encountered in everyday life of many a married couple. From the romance burning out and the marriage morphing into a companionate business partnership keeping the familial ship afloat and on course, to threats of other men sneaking into the equation and the lack of attention on behalf of both partners chipping away at mutual trust, the Taskers go through it all. And because Harry is a de facto domesticated Superman, it offers an invitation for you to imagine you could be that superhero as well and fix your life the way Harry does. 

This is another interesting fantasy because the way Harry Tasker fixes his marriage and wins appreciation both of his wife and his daughter is by essentially taking them to work with him. He sorts out the sneaky beta-suitor used car salesman posing as a spy (Bill Paxton) by both making the perp pee his pants and by finally recognizing he had been neglecting his wife for far too long. She needed attention, passion and excitement to still be present in her life while he was busy having it all during work hours, so to combat these desires Harry gave her a job and inadvertently triggered a chain reaction that led to Helen recognizing her husband was not a boring dweeb she thought he was. He was a superhero in a salesman’s garb. She even admits as much in one great scene after Harry tells his would-be torturer what he’d do to him only seconds before doing it. As Arnie cocks his gun, Helen utters “I married Rambo.” Which is also a fun little jab because we are all aware of the longstanding feud Schwarzenegger had with Stallone in the 80s. But I digress. 

The key part of the True Lies daydream is not only the idea of you imagining you could be Harry Tasker or that you wish you could save your family (and the world) the way he does, but rather the concept of getting your partner and your children to enter your world and appreciate what you do as a result of experiencing it. True Lies is essentially a “take your family to work” fantasy in the world of James Bond… where you get to be James Bond, ridiculous as it may seem.  

Granted, Harry’s daughter Dana gets taken on this work experience day by force, as she is taken hostage by the Crimson Jihad, but it also sets the stage for the most exhilarating moment in the movie where Harry gets to save her both from falling to her death and from the hands of the evil terrorist played so perfectly by Art Malik. The very moment Arnie pulls up in a Harrier jet and signals for Dana she should jump and that he would not let her fall is an absolute showstopper, partly because the sequence itself is insane and an amazing feat of special effects work, but also because this is how Dana finds out what her dad does for a living. Her boring suit-wearing embarrassment of a father shows up in sliced up shirt, his pectorals protruding and all, piloting a fighter jet like a pro to save his little princess from what looks like certain demise. What a way to tell your kid what your work entails, clearly superior even to the neck-snapping, petrol-blazing, helicopter-snatching and kissing in front of nuclear explosions Harry was busy with a few minutes earlier.  

Thus, the middle-aged dad daydream completes, and True Lies wraps up its bonkers fantasy that successfully hybridizes the 80s action man with the 90s everyman to create a domestic superhero Harry Tasker is. He’s a superspy, a martial arts pro, a horse-riding, gun-toting badass, a casual fighter jet pilot, a loving husband, a caring dad, a dummkopf who doesn’t know how to play thumb war… all rolled into one character. Which makes him the perfect vehicle to inhabit and live vicariously through in a bout of unforgettable daydreaming fantasy where you—a middle-aged doofus who wants his family to appreciate him and his hard work adding columns in Excel, delivering on quarterly KPIs and managing team dramas nobody wants to hear about at the dinner table—get to imagine you could be a domesticated superhero, too.