As James Cameron continues his victory lap as re-throned king of the world with both Avatar: The Way of Water and Titanic making more and more millions at the box office, here comes a striking reminder that not everything he touches turns to gold. Granted, it might only be the lightest of grazes with just a token executive producer credit but the finished product is so thoroughly junky that even the mildest of associations is the kind of embarrassment one would want scrubbed from both IMDb page and televisual history at large.
It didn’t have to be this way. Conceptually, converting his boisterously entertaining 1994 action comedy True Lies into a TV series isn’t entirely ill-advised; the loose set-up of mixing marital strife with high-octane action was already enough to inspire 2005’s equally enjoyable Mr and Mrs Smith, itself receiving a more prestige-y small screen transfer later this year courtesy of Donald Glover. (One could argue the film also led to Date Night, Knight and Day and a flurry of other genre-mixing crowd-pleasers.) At one point Cameron was set to take a larger role before retreating into the blue and handing over the baton to a team that promptly drops it, falls over and lands flat on their faces. What once felt zippy and slick (if a little dated with its gender politics) now feels leaden and cheap, a cruel reminder of the fun we once had almost 30 years ago.
