No one blinks anymore when a movie costs $100 million. That’s what most Hollywood movies cost today, isn’t it? It’s what Apple spent, for example, on this past weekend’s Fly Me to the Moon, the kind of frothy, human-scaled, adult-oriented comedy that’s often cited as counterprogramming to the expensive blockbusters the studios otherwise bankroll. Meanwhile, last year’s The Creator was celebrated for achieving its eye-popping special-effects spectacle for the low, low price of… $80 million. Executives now cross the nine-figures line like it’s nothing.
There was a time, of course, when $100 million still meant something — when it was not just a high price tag for a movie, but the highest. Thirty years ago, the summer action-comedy True Lies exploded into theaters, ushering the film industry into a new era of budgetary extravagance. The Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle marked the first time a studio coughed up $100 million before marketing. It was, in cost (if not scale or performance), the biggest movie ever made up to that point.
Does it come as any kind of surprise that the king of the world himself, James Cameron, was the director to pass that threshold? Cameron and Schwarzenegger had come close to passing it with their previous collaboration, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which was also the previous record-holder for most money ever splurged on a motion picture. (According to some estimates, Cameron set the record in 1989, too, with his sci-fi adventure The Abyss.) With True Lies, the two reunited for a splashy screwball blockbuster that seemed to put the steroidal Hollywood action movies of the decade prior on, well, steroids.
The years leading up to 1994 were an arms race, emphasis on the (oaky, toned, terrorist-strangling) arms: Rippling action heroes expanded their body mass and body counts, the wanton destruction and the budgets ballooning with them. The increasingly self-parodic testosterone fests of the 1980s and beyond were all leading to this one slick, oversized entertainment. More than that, True Lies was the ultimate monument to Schwarzenegger’s then-massive popularity, a star vehicle that gave all of his hallmarks — pithy one-liners, ridiculous stunts, fiery explosions — their largest platform yet.
Watching the movie today is a time-warp experience. In ways both charming and much less so, it’s plainly a smash from another era. That era isn’t always 1994, either. Cameron may have marshaled state-of-the-art technology in pursuit of an enormous multiplex payday, redefining spectacle on the cusp of the new millennium, but there’s something a little old-fashioned — some would say retrograde — about his bombastic remake of the much smaller French action farce La Totale!
Right from the in media res opening, in which secret agent Harry Tasker dramatically emerges from the ice to crash a swanky Swiss party, it’s clear that True Lies is attempting a cheeky modern riff on 007. Of course, it’s absurd to cast a downright inhumanly built hercules with a thick, undisguisable Austrian accent as a spy. Almost as absurd as the idea that a guy who looks like Schwarzenegger could convince his suburban family that he’s an ordinary, boring salesman. Whether the film recognizes the improbability of the scenario or not, there’s a goofy pleasure in seeing this particular muscle man strain to project James Bond suavity. It’s like if they tried passing Richard Kiel off as Roger Moore.
Cameron had expertly utilized Schwarzenegger’s impossible physique and dramatic limitations in The Terminator, and then capitalized on his comic potential in the sequel, which flipped the T-800 into a force of good and a deadpan fish out of water. In True Lies, he mirrors Arnold’s celebrity ubiquity by casting him as a veritable superhero — less a character than a billboard-sized emblem of the Schwarzenegger appeal, or what it had become by the mid-’90s. He’s “cool,” he’s “funny,” he’s every bit the fantasy creation Arnold played in the previous year’s maligned semi-hit Last Action Hero. By also making Tasker a domesticated family man — albeit one hiding his line of dangerous work from his family — True Lies also winks at the extent to which the killing machine from Commando and Predator had been softened into an all-ages marquee attraction by ’94.
As pure spectacle, the movie is amusing and occasionally exciting. There’s a fun sequence where Harry takes off on horseback and ends up chasing a motorcycle-riding bad guy through a mall. He also gets into a jokey shootout in a pristine restroom that anticipates similar urinal-smashing scenes in later James Bond and Mission: Impossible movies. By the endless last hour, however, the film’s playful mayhem has become more exhausting than entertaining, with Cameron blowing untold resources on a glib cartoon onslaught of prototypically Schwarzeneggerian destruction. There’s a smirking irrelevance to the violence; while some of the star’s other movies are more vicious, few treat bloodshed as such a wan punchline.
Other elements of the film are downright noxious, and always have been. True Lies epitomizes the glee in which Hollywood stereotypes Arabs and treats them as cannon fodder. And the central comic conceit — Harry discovers that his mousey wife (Jamie Lee Curtis) may be having an affair, and uses the resources of the intelligence community to coerce her into a fake erotic mission she thinks is real — is way more creepy than sexy. You can see the shape of something potentially romantic in this setup: Harry realizes that he’s let the spark go out of his marriage, and finds a way to give his wife the adventure she’s been craving. But his plan basically amounts to humiliating and terrifying her, right up to the movie’s most iconic scene — not an action set piece, but rather the deceptive hotel room rendezvous where she performs a “seductive” striptease at his incognito beckoning. Curtis, to her credit, almost redeems this whole gross development with her goofy, feigned vampiness. Almost.
Plenty of contemporary critics dinged True Lies for its sexism and xenophobia, but audiences ate the movie up. It was a big hit, if not the year’s biggest. (It fell short of two blockbusters released the same summer, Forrest Gump and The Lion King.) The genie was out of the bottle when it came to studio spending. Budgets would keep climbing in the years after, crossing new milestones. Cameron himself would double that historic $100 million investment a mere three years later with his next movie, a little trouble-plagued disaster weepie called Titanic.
If True Lies kicked off a new era of open pockets and ever-inflating investments, it was also something of a last hurrah for its particular variety of studio entertainment. The age of unstoppable muscle men mowing down goons was coming to an end. Of course, we still have towering he-man action heroes; to some extent, both Vin Diesel and The Rock have carried that torch into the 21st century. But after True Lies, the industry began to drift away from budget-busting bonanzas built around a single macho headliner. The future would privilege comic-book superheroes, intellectual property, and dazzling digital effects work (like the kind ironically showcased in T2) over the analog charisma of a tough guy firing bullets and sarcastic kiss-offs. It was as if Cameron and Schwarzenegger took that kind of movie to its logical endpoint — to a jokey, cartoonishly epic, wallet-emptying extreme — and in the process maybe hastened its inevitable decline.
The same could perhaps be said for Schwarzenegger’s stock. True Lies marked the summit of his bankability. He had more hits in him (the following summer’s Eraser did strong business, for a movie nobody really remembers) and he’d earn some colossal paydays (like the $25 million he netted to play Mr. Freeze in Batman & Robin). But his status as the world’s biggest movie star waned in the years after True Lies, leading up to his long hiatus from screens and move into politics in 2003. In 1994, he was on top of the world, headlining the most expensive movie ever made, a glorified tribute to the very qualities that had pushed him to the upper echelons of Hollywood success. But what goes up must eventually come down — except, apparently, when we’re talking about movie budgets, which are still reaching for new heights of spendthrift obscenity three decades later.
True Lies is currently streaming on Hulu. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, please visit his Authory page.
