It has been 13 years since news first broke of a possible television adaptation of True Lies, James Cameron’s 1994 action-comedy blockbuster. That film, about a secret agent who accidentally ropes his unassuming wife into his secret identity—thereby spicing up their stuck-in-a-rut marriage—is a bombastic and exhilarating take on the spy genre, led by two committed performances from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis.
At its best, it defined ’90s sex appeal, and at its worst, it had some very off-color jokes and plotlines about religious extremism and terrorism. There was plenty to be corrected for a different era and new audiences.
But after more than a decade of anticipation, the serialized True Lies remake arrives sans any high or low points. Instead, this new mission has been dumped on our doorstep with all of its edges smoothed out into one impossibly tedious block of pure, televised lead.
The series, which premieres Mar. 1 on CBS, certainly has enough going for it. Its cast is competent enough, and its effects team is game to amp up the hokey, hyper-technological concept of spies that we rarely see anymore in the age of Daniel Craig’s stonefaced James Bond. Yet, somehow, the spark remains entirely unlit.
True Lies produces a dearth of sexual chemistry, almost as if the writers were unsure whether the series would end up in primetime or on Nickelodeon. Inexplicably, it takes everything that the original film got so very right and chucks it out of the pilot’s side of a helicopter. Cameron’s film capitalized on Schwarzenegger’s persona as a large, lovable, but sometimes incompetent oaf. Paired with Curtis—who had already begun to shed her image as helpless scream queen with roles in action flicks like Blue Steel—the two actors made for chemistry that was real and romantic enough to carry the weight of Cameron’s outrageous premise.
Watered down for television, the True Lies series bungles the distinctly ’90s, go-for-broke drama and replaces it with stale parenting jokes and inexplicably action-less action sequences. The result is a bizarrely sanitized effort that squanders plenty of potential in favor of one of the most eerily robotic remakes in recent memory—and perhaps, ever.
In this sterile refashion, audiences once again meet Harry and Helen Tasker, now played by Steve Howey and Ginger Gonzaga, respectively. The plot is essentially the same as Cameron’s film: A super spy, working for a top-secret organization called the Omega Sector, is having a tricky time with his work-life balance. Harry is constantly leaving for last-minute “sales conferences,” and his wife is getting fed up, suspecting Harry of cheating. So, in a pinch, Harry invites Helen to accompany him on a mission to Paris, calling it a much-needed vacation. Surprise, surprise, Harry’s cover is blown when the enemy finds him and Helen together.
By the end of the series premiere, True Lies has essentially covered all of the narrative ground that Cameron’s screenplay did. After Helen joins Harry on the rest of his mission, she’s debriefed and hired by Omega Sector as a spy herself, just like Curtis at the end of the original film. One might think that this would leave the televised adaptation to cover exciting new ground, ducking in and out of glamorous international locations and thwarting silly, world-threatening bad guys.
Except, there’s just one problem: True Lies works so well as a film because it wraps itself up into a concise, feature-length runtime. Left to mine the basic plot for any remaining excitement, the writers struggle with concocting something remotely engaging, let alone coherent. This leaves the principal cast to walk around, twiddling their thumbs and trying their very best to make anything out of a threadbare series premise.
The fun of True Lies is supposed to come from watching Helen, once completely unaware of the constant danger her family was in, come to grips with her husband’s secret identity while trying to use whatever skills she has to escape peril. In the film, Curtis plays Helen with a brilliantly genuine ignorance, oscillating between fury and shock, but willing to adapt at every turn. While Gonzaga is a worthy duplicate, she’s strapped with scripts and character beats that fundamentally misunderstand what makes Helen compelling. Things come too easily for Gonzaga’s Helen, and it’s hard not to roll your eyes as soon as she’s instantly incapacitating villains with moves from her at-home kickboxing and yoga workouts.
But at least Gonzaga is making an effort. Howey, on the other hand, seems entirely lost as her counterpart. The only part of him that reads as “spy” is his hulking frame, as if the casting directors merely had “Schwarzenegger-type” on their call sheet and went with the first person who strolled in the room. Howey, who played a dimwitted charmer on Reba and an unexpectedly tenderhearted bar owner who oozed sex appeal on Shameless, should be perfectly adept at nailing the ridiculous spy role. But True Lies gives him nothing to do besides point fake guns. The rest of his time is spent helplessly gazing at Gonzaga, the two actors silently trying to figure out how they got into this sexless mess.
True Lies could at least be a worthwhile background watch if it produced some absurdist spy content, harkening back to the era of its cinematic predecessor, when gizmos and gadgets were all the rage. But these just might be the most humdrum people to ever get their hands on a poison blow dart. Spy tech is thrown around in True Lies with little to no explanation of its use, and then discarded almost instantly. Either that, or it’s shoddily crafted, plucking the viewer out of the story entirely when it appears. At one point in the premiere, a CGI retinal scan tool comes shooting out of an elevator panel, looking like some abomination straight out of the first Spy Kids movie. Things only devolve from there.
Occasionally, a completely unprecedented style choice will take hold out of nowhere, leaving the viewer blinking hard, trying to figure out what the hell just happened. An ad break will end with a shot from the inside of a refrigerator. Or, a montage of photos will suddenly start playing fullscreen, set to bizarrely sexy music. In fact, that music is about the only sensual thing here. While it’s unfair to expect a made-for-cable adaptation to mimic the eroticism of an R-rated film, it’s tough not to miss that wealth of energy from Curtis’ iconic striptease. Nothing that hot ever happens here. The writers seem more concerned with how Harry and Helen are going to replace their broken dishwasher than they do any physical intimacy.
Even after several episodes of True Lies, there still isn’t a single narrative throughline for viewers to grasp onto. Unlike Cameron’s original film, the show isn’t remotely rewarding. Howey and Gonzaga can’t conjure up any of the natural chemistry that was so palpable between Schwarzenegger and Curtis, and the series doesn’t want them to. It would rather keep throwing them into the same, redressed studio backlot and call it Paris in one scene and Austria the next, expecting audiences to fill in the blanks.
There’s no fun, no thrills, and no sex. Hell, there are barely any lies! What we’re subjected to instead is a criminally wooden, algorithmic remake without a single original idea to prop itself up. Is it too late to abort this mission?
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