Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1994 Action-Comedy Is Still One of His Best (& You Probably Didn’t Know It Was a Remake)

For a good chunk of the late 80’s and early 90’s, Arnold Schwarzenegger was trying to prove he was more than just the guy who blew things up and said one-liners. Twins and Kindergarten Cop highlighted his comedic chops, while Terminator 2: Judgment Day established him as the biggest action star in Hollywood. But one of his most entertaining movies was able to combine both sides of his career, with some spectacular action sequences and a genuinely funny story about a marriage that isn’t all that it seems.

Schwarzenegger worked with director James Cameron again two years after Terminator 2 in True Lies, which was released on July 15, 1994. Schwarzenegger is secret agent Harry Tasker whose wife, Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), thinks he is a computer salesman. When Harry starts to suspect Helen of having an affair, he uses his government resources to investigate her. Only to find his personal and professional lives colliding when an international terrorist plot threatens his family. It’s a premise that turned Schwarzenegger into James Bond if he longed to be a suburbanite, but that’s what makes the movie work. Cameron pulled off the rare balancing act of mixing comedy with some of the biggest action sequences of the decade. Here’s the original True Lies trailer, which gives you a pretty good idea how the movie was being sold as a massive James Cameron action movie:

Le Totale Remake

What people may not realize is that True Lies is actually a remake of the 1991 French comedy La Totale!, directed by Claude Zidi and starring Thierry Lhermitte and Miou-Miou. Even more surprising, Schwarzenegger was the one who brought the movie to Cameron. The director recalled watching the original with Arnold and recognizing the possibilities of turning its domestic comedy into something much bigger.

Cameron substantially reworked the material, expanding the action and transforming a relatively modest French production into a Hollywood blockbuster. While his movies have always featured moments of humor, True Lies remains the only full-fledged comedy he’s directed. It’s also one of his most entertaining films, largely because he surrounded Schwarzenegger with performers who knew how to make the comedy work. Here’s the trailer for the original film, La Totale!:

An All-Star Team, With a Surprising Rookie MVP

Tom Arnold may just be the film’s secret weapon. At the time, Arnold was more famous for his turbulent marriage to Roseanne Barr than his acting career, and Fox reportedly balked at casting him because of his tabloid reputation. Cameron lobbied for Arnold, who auditioned for a small bartender role before securing the part of Harry’s partner, Albert Gibson. It turned out Cameron knew what he was doing. Arnold gets some of the biggest laughs in the movie, whether he’s frantically checking to make sure a bullet hasn’t taken out his family jewels or watching Harry dance effortlessly with Juno Skinner (Tia Carrere). His tired intonation of “Of course he can waltz” is the epitome of the resignation of the average husband watching a movie star put all other men to shame. Tom Arnold called True Lies a “career-saving event,” with his marriage to Barr falling apart during the movie.

You have to credit Jamie Lee Curtis for making True Lies work. Most of the comic relief was handled by Tom Arnold, but Curtis also proved her serious comedy chops, having already starred in Trading Places and A Fish Called Wanda. As Helen Tasker, she evolves from a bored housewife who believes her husband is a computer salesman to a woman discovering that her marriage has been built on an elaborate lie. Curtis generates some of the film’s biggest laughs, especially during the hotel-room striptease, but she also gives the story its emotional stakes. She won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy for her performance. Cameron also brought back his longtime friend and frequent collaborator Bill Paxton, who appeared in The Terminator and Aliens. Paxton plays Simon, the sleazy used car salesman who pretends to be a secret agent to get women to sleep with him. This gives the movie another one of its funniest performances. Eliza Dushku, in a pre-Buffy the Vampire Slayer role, also portrayed Harry and Helen’s teenage daughter Dana.

Of course Cameron didn’t forget the action. The film has a horse and motorcycle chase through a plush hotel, a spectacular helicopter rescue on the bridge at the Florida Keys, and a climax where Schwarzenegger flies a Harrier jet over Miami. That horse stunt got a little too dangerous for Arnold’s liking. “On True Lies, you probably remember the horse scene. There was a shot where the horse had to stop at the edge of a building,” Schwarzenegger wrote on a Reddit AMA. “They built a little ramp to give the horse longer to stop. But when they were measuring the new distance from the ramp to the camera, they dropped the arm of the camera on the horse’s nose, and it went crazy, spinning and rearing. There was no rail, and the ramp was only 4 feet wide. I realized it was a bad situation, and I slid off the horse right away, and a stuntman grabbed me. That one was really scary. If the horse stepped a foot the wrong way, we would have fallen 90 feet to a cement floor.”

True Lies reportedly cost about $115 million to make, making it one of the most expensive movies ever made at the time, but it paid off with nearly $379 million worldwide and an Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects. Over three decades later, the movie continues to be one of Schwarzenegger’s best films, as it doesn’t require audiences to choose between his action-star persona or his comedic chops. James Cameron took a pretty obscure French comedy and turned it into a huge Hollywood spectacle. Jamie Lee Curtis and Tom Arnold helped make the movie just as entertaining between the explosions. Shame he never had another stab at directing a comedy, though, considering this was Cameron’s one and only.