True Lies Review

As pure spectacle this is Cameron at his loosest, and the set pieces are among the best of the decade. The horse chase through a hotel that ends at a lift door, the bathroom fight staged in mirrors, the tango opening, the Harrier hovering over a Miami causeway while a nuclear weapon goes off in the Keys, all of it is staged with a clarity that the genre lost soon after. Jamie Lee Curtis is the reason it works as comedy, and she plays a bored suburban wife discovering she has an appetite with a commitment nobody asked her for.

Then there is the sequence where her husband uses federal surveillance to frighten her, blackmail her into stripping for an unseen man and film it, played entirely for laughs. It was uncomfortable in 1994 and it is worse now. The Arab villains are caricatures that Arab American groups objected to at release, and Tom Arnold's sidekick comedy is broad enough to leave marks. A dazzling machine with a mean centre.