One year before the James Bond franchise made a major comeback with Pierce Brosnan’s GoldenEye, James Cameron decided to turn Arnold Schwarzenegger into a secret agent in True Lies. Just two years after Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the idea of selling Arnold to audiences as a kind of tongue-in-cheek 007 figure was risky as hell. In the days before the first Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible, and on the eve of Bond’s comeback in the Brosnan-era, an espionage action movie of this type wasn’t necessarily a slam-dunk. But, what made True Lies click was that it wasn’t a straight-up Bond knock-off. Instead — riffing off of a French film called La Totale! — Cameron took an over-the-top spy movie and turned it, partially, into a rom-com.
