True Lies

Director: James Cameron

1994 / 141min / 35mm

To his wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis) and teenage daughter, Harry Tasker (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a workaday traveling salesman—but out on the road, he’s one of America’s most elite counterterrorism agents. When Harry stage-manages a fake espionage mission to give bored Helen a thrill, they get sucked into a real plot against America that takes them on an action-packed couple’s vacation to Miami and the Keys, and forces Helen to emerge as a deadly force in her own right. “Much of the [movie’s appeal] comes from the smooth grafting of battle-of-the-sexes comedy onto a high-tech action picture… Cameron, the film’s writer and director, blows up plenty of bridges, trucks, and jets here. Along the way he explodes sexual stereotypes too.”—The New York Times