‘True Lies’ and the Suspension of Disbelief

The movie is honest about itself.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s most purely fun movie may well be True Lies.

The 1994 James Cameron film casts Schwarzenegger as an ultra-skilled secret agent whose work is so secret that his wife and daughter know nothing about it. They think Harry Tasker is merely a boring computer salesman. But Harry’s worlds are about to collide.

Jamie Lee Curtis co-stars as his wife, Helen, and she complements Schwarzenegger nicely. Whereas he’s built to be an action star, Curtis can play an ordinary person. Helen is an everywoman who wants more out of life, and she’s unaware that her husband is already experiencing much more.

The movie gradually brings Helen into Harry’s exciting world, just as it brings comedy and action together into a blissful marriage.

The opening scene sets the tone as it showcases Harry’s various spy skills, presenting him as near-superhuman and making it clear that this movie has no interest in any serious examination of geopolitical affairs. From the get-go, True Lies is honest about what kind of movie this is.

An excellent sequence builds on this shortly later, when a terrorist flees on a motorcycle and Harry chases him—not on foot, not in a car, not in any vehicle, but on horseback.

The chase proceeds into a hotel lobby. Bringing a motorcycle into a hotel is already over the top, but then Harry rides the horse past all these hotel guests and even into an elevator, much to the dismay of an old couple who now has to squeeze around the animal. Along the way, Harry politely apologizes to the people he and the horse inconvenience. Touches like this are a hallmark of the movie—taking epic action and sprinkling bits of the mundane on it.

The scene relies on simple but effective absurdity: placing a familiar animal in exactly the wrong setting. The execution is superb right up to the end, when we’re primed to expect Harry to pull off a daring leap to a neighboring rooftop … but the horse has more sense than that and puts a firm stop to such madness. The scene subverts expectations without getting too clever about it.

Another memorable, humorous moment comes later when Helen—possessing no combat skills whatsoever—drops a gun down a flight of stairs. The weapon keeps firing off as it bounces from step to step, and these accidental shots end up taking out all the bad guys without hurting her or Harry. It’s not just an incredible stroke of luck—it’s several incredible strokes of luck.

And that’s the thing about True Lies. It’s hardly the most believable movie there ever was. It asks us to excuse quite a bit, such as how Harry uses government resources to spy on his wife and crash her affair (right as she realizes she can’t go through with it).

He then uses the pretext of an interrogation to learn what she really thinks of him and their marriage. Upon hearing that Helen wants to do something daring and meaningful for a change, Harry compounds his lies by forcing her to participate in a phony operation. Maybe he thinks he’s giving her what she wants. Maybe it’s revenge for the near-affair. Or perhaps a bit of both. But it’s cruel. He leads her to believe that she’s in a real, dangerous situation when he’s actually right there watching her pole-dance with a bed.

Harry is no more a gentleman than he is a computer salesman, and he’s no Father of the Year either. His partner Gib (Tom Arnold) needs to remind him how old his daughter is.

The story is ultimately about the relationship between a husband and wife, as well as their daughter (who’s played by a young, pre-Buffy Eliza Dushku). The movie’s North Star is bringing these three people closer together. None of them are saints, but that’s beside the point.

Everything around this premise is expertly structured. The horseback chase early in the movie isn’t just an amusing little episode in the life of special agent Harry Tasker. It advances the story. It cracks the barrier between Harry’s professional life and his family life.

The incident makes the news, and sleazy used car salesman Simon (Bill Paxton) uses it to seduce women. Simon pretends that he was the daring secret agent tackling those terrorists. He lures Helen with her husband’s actual adventure, and Helen indeed finds herself drawn to these … let’s call them “true lies.”

Events escalate from there until Helen is fully immersed in Harry’s real mission. The action set pieces are bombastic in exactly the right way. Superb attention to detail keeps the tension alive and the audience engaged, and selective touches of realism inject comedy into the excitement, such as not being able to hear someone over the noise of a helicopter.

Harry: The bridge is out!

Helen: What?

Harry: The bridge is out!

Helen: I can’t hear you! What? [turns around] Oh, God! The bridge is out! The bridge is out, Harry!

It is not realistic overall, but it’s internally believable because the world feels consistent. When a dropped gun is conveniently hitting all the right targets, we remember that this is the same movie that brought a horse into an elevator. So, it tracks.

True Lies is not here to impart any moral wisdom, and it is certainly not presenting a slice-of-life, naturalistic view of the world. True Lies exists to offer us—like Helen—a fun and exciting escape from our day-to-day lives. And it succeeds.