James Cameron’s Underrated $379M Action Comedy Just Became Easier to Watch on Streaming

Although several of James Cameron‘s biggest movies have been available on streaming consistently for years, there are some titles that have been more elusive on the ever-changing libraries of the most prominent platforms. While Cameron’s most renowned movies like Avatar and Aliens are constantly available now via Disney+, one of his most underrated action movies has not always been available to watch. That changes today, as Hulu adds his 1994 reteaming with Arnold Schwarzenegger that played things less seriously than they did three years earlier in Terminator 2: Judgement Day. This time around, the big action set pieces were accompanied with a combination of espionage drama, bombastic action sequences, and a large helping of marital unrest played to full comedic effect.

The movie is True Lies, which finds Schwarzenegger playing Harry Tasker, a smooth secret agent who keeps his work secret from his wife, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, who believes he is nothing but a boring computer salesman. While Harry goes off on his latest mission to stop nuclear warheads being smuggled into the country, he begins to believe that his wife is having an affair with a used car salesman, and very quickly all of their paths collide in the explosive way you would expect from one of Cameron’s peak action era movies. The movie comes with a strong supporting cast including Art Malik, Tom Arnold, Bill Paxton, and a young Eliza Dushku, and delivers a solid movie with plenty of laughs and some thrilling set pieces as long as you are willing to suspend disbelief for most of its lengthy 140 minute runtime.

True Lies Had a Truly Huge Budget

If there is one thing that can be said about James Cameron without any doubt, it is that he does not let the price of making a visually stunning movie get in the way of his decisions as a filmmaker. His multi-million dollar Avatar movies have cost more than the entire catalogs of some smaller studios, and back in 1994 he broke the bank by making True Lies one of the first movies to have a budget of over $100 million. While this could seem like a huge gamble, it is worth remembering that at the time both Cameron and Schwarzenegger were coming off the huge success of Terminator 2, and they had both delivered plenty of hits to make it a safe bet for the studio. While Cameron’s comedy chops were not that well regarded, Schwarzenegger had already appeared in movies like Kindergarten Cop and Twins proving he could successfully tread the line between genres.

As it turned out, while True Lies did not perhaps get the dues it deserved, there were plenty of signs that the movie was anything but a dud. Along with its strong $379 million box office – which was followed up by a huge home video release – the movie gained plenty of praise from highly esteemed and often hard to please critic Roger Ebert, who hailed Cameron as a “master of action,” as though that fact was ever in doubt. Just to add to the accolades, Curtis earned herself a Golden Globe for her performance as Harry’s out-of-her-depth wife. If you have just over a couple of hours to spare and are looking for a movie that will pass the time with non-stop thrills and laughs, then True Lies is exactly where you will find it, and it is now available at the click of a button on Hulu.

Where does True Lies rank on your list of James Cameron movies? Let us know in the comments.

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