Every week we take a look at a classic movie that’s endured in the cultural landscape, and remember why we were all so obsessed with it in the first place, and why it’s worth another look today
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first ever regular scripted TV series has something very familiar about it.
You don’t have to think too hard about why FUBAR, an action-adventure series in which he plays a secret agent whose identity is found out by his daughter (also a secret agent), has a distinct whiff of deja vu.
Schwarzenegger very helpfully tells you himself. “Everywhere I go, people ask me when I’m going to do another big action comedy like True Lies,” he said in a statement, deliberately evoking James Cameron’s 1994 blockbuster, then the most expensive film ever made with a budget upwards of $US100 million.
True Lies, based on a French movie from three years earlier, was a commercial success, taking in $US378 million worldwide, the third highest movie of the year behind The Lion King and Forrest Gump.
It was also a hell of a time. In case you’ve never seen it, Schwarzenegger plays Harry Tasker, seemingly a boring software salesman who spends a lot of time on the road. He’s lied to his wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Dana (Eliza Dushku), who have no idea about his real occupation.
At the same time, Harry is embroiled in a terrorist’s extortion plot and catching Helen out on an almost-affair. The two storylines, of course, intersect and the super-agent has to try to save the world and his marriage.
Cameron, in an interview at the time, said his ambition was to take a “simple and cute concept and scale it up to what we call a domestic epic”. He asked, “What are the repercussions of this kind of adventurous life?”
As is Cameron’s raison d’etre, those adventures included incredible stunts. True Lies is a cornucopia of pyrotechnics – loads of things blow up and the character had to swim under a body of water lit aflame on top.
And who could forget the film’s iconic “you’re fired” scene when Harry dispatches the bad guy with a pithy line and the clever use of a missile from a fighter jet.
There was also the tango scene, which Schwarzenegger said he learnt after taking weeks of lessons, with the goal of besting Al Pacino’s tangoing in Scent of a Woman, which had been released recently.
But there’s one stunt that nearly killed Schwarzenegger, as he recalled in an interview to Entertainment Tonight while promoting True Lies’ release.
The set-piece involved extensive stunt work with an equine scene partner as Harry borrows a police horse to hunt down the villain through the Marriott hotel, who is weaving through the crowd on a motorbike.
As Harry gives chase, galloping through a band in the ballroom, wreaking havoc in the kitchen and squeezing into a glass elevator, he’s at least polite about it, constantly excusing himself.
Once he and the horse are on the roof of the Marriott, the villain, played by Art Malik, rides his bike off the edge, landing in a pool atop an adjacent building. Harry backs up the horse and tries to do the same, but the horse, correctly, deduces this is a kamikaze mission and halts.
In the film, Harry is thrown over the top of the horse and is dangling off the building, barely hanging on to the reins. The horse pulls him back up but in real-life, the horse wasn’t so deserving of those onscreen “attaboys”.
Schwarzenegger told ET, “I almost got killed because we went to the top of roof with the horse and there was no railing and the horse somehow freaked out and it backed up and one of the hoofs of the horse was hanging off the roof.
“If it had made one more step, I would’ve been done. The stunt guys jumped at the horse for the reins and pulled the horse back. And it was a drop of at least 30 feet.”
When Schwarzenegger told that story again in 2014, the drop had grown to 90 feet. Whichever version is closer to the truth, it was still a perilous moment.
There was also an underwater scene which went wrong during filming, and Schwarzenegger couldn’t see through the milky water to see where it was safe to emerge. His stunt double pulled him out of trouble.
All those close calls form part of why True Lies has remained an iconic action-adventure blockbuster, even though some of the stereotypes it deployed are less palatable today.
But it was gutsy, and partly because Schwarzenegger was coming off the underwhelming movie Last Action Hero, which called into question whether the future-governor was still a box office draw.
If the reaction to Last Action Hero’s critical derision and underperforming box office an indication, Cameron was a fool to reunite with his Terminator star in this James Bond-esque caper.
When it was released, True Lies was mooted as a potential franchise, at a time when squeezing every last bit of creative and financial juice out of a title was still novel. It would take another 29 years before there was another chapter in the True Lies universe.
A TV remake debuted in March this year. It was cancelled by May.
More Coverage
It’s not True Lies without Schwarzenegger, and a low-rent TV version was never going to cut it. And now there’s FUBAR, even if it’s also, not quite True Lies.
At least we’ll always have the original.
True Lies is streaming now on Disney+
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7r7HWrGWcp51jrrZ7xKernqqklravucSnq2iln6u2pr%2BOsJ%2BarF2pvG7DwK2aoWWWoa60tMGamqRlpJ2ybq%2FRmrGyZaSnwqZ5y6KcrGWjqcKvwIytn5qsXZa5rrvSrWSkoZyhsqV5wKulop1fo7K4v4ysq6iqqWR9drGQbWlpm2FqsnGwj52ab2iRboByrpByZ2tqaGV%2Fow%3D%3D