Transcript

Intro Clip

What's going on, man? A second or something looks like you got gut kicked. What's hell? What's hell, man? What's hell? Helen. Helen has something to do with Helen, I'm guessing. Helen. Helen. Helen. Helen. He's having enough fear. Welcome to the club, man. Nobody thinks it can happen to them. The first time, buddy. Same detective thing happening with wife number two, remember? I had no idea nothing was going on, right? I come home one day and the. House is completely empty. And I mean completely empty. She even took the ice cube trays out of the freezer. What kind of a sick bitch takes the ice cube trays out of the freezer? Oh, Helen. Hey, Harry. Hey, listen, Helen still loves you. You know, she just wants to bang. This guy for a while, you know? It's nothing serious. You'll get used to it, soon as-- Stop! Cheering me up?

Steve

It's two dads, one movie. It's the podcast where two middle aged dads sit around and shoot the shit about the movies of the 80s and 90s. Here are your hosts, Steve Paulo and Nic Briana. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Two Dads, One Movie. I'm Steve.

Nic

And I'm Nic.

Steve

And today we are taking another step through Janu Arnie and looking at the 1994 James Cameron classic, True Lies. And I'm so excited about this one. Oh, man. I'll be honest with you. This was my pick. And I got to be honest with you, Nic, like, I, picked it because I have very fond memories of it. I had not seen it, I think in at least 10, maybe 15 years. It had been a long time since I've watched it yesterday. And I, it, look, we've watched a lot of great movies together. This is episode 45. So we have watched a bunch of great episodes together, or episodes, a bunch of great movies together. And I don't know that I've had more fun watching any of them than I had watching this. It was a lot of fun.

Nic

This one, it doesn't let up. It really doesn't. And, yeah, yeah. I'm glad you picked this one. What, what's your, what's your history with this?

Steve

I think I probably saw this. It wouldn't have been in the theaters again. Rated R came out when we were, like, 14. My parents, you know, they were, they were pretty strict on the R rated stuff until I got a little older. So this would have been a blockbuster pickup for me at about 16 or 17 years old. But I definitely saw it in, in high school. You know, I had a huge crush on Eliza Dushku from, you know, like, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a few other, the movie bring it on, you know, later on in her career, and then Jane's on a whole strike back. So huge Eliza Dushku fan. Very, very fond of her. She's actually almost exactly our age. She was born in 80. And, and there's that. And then, of course, like Jamie Lee Curtis, you know, by the time I saw this, I'd seen the, the theatrical cut of trading places, and, oh, okay. Okay. Nice. It was not surprising when she, you know, takes off that dress and just the body is just. Banging, like, absolutely ridiculous. There were a lot of things to enjoy with this movie. It's funny. It's a ton of action, just wall to wall action sequences, and then beautiful people. And it's just a lot of great stuff to enjoy. Maybe not enjoyable in every way anymore. We'll see as we get through it. But yeah, this is just one of those movies that stuck with me, I think, because of its combination of comedy, of humor and action in a way that pure comedies and pure action movies maybe don't.

Nic

So yeah, yeah. I mean, it is really, really funny. Um, I definitely didn't see this in the theater, and I actually didn't see this for a while. I don't think I saw it until after college, which is weird, 'cause I loved, it was just one that I never owned. I never had movie channels, so I was like, I am subject to the DVDs that I own. So once again, let's watch Mark for Death. And, so I didn't see this probably till my, I don't know, mid-late 20s. And was blown away by it. Yeah, yeah. Was like, why haven't I seen this before? This is incredible. And I love Arnie, and it was just one that wasn't in my rotation. So much fun, and even one that it's rated R and it hasn't earned R rating, but it's not horrifically grotesque like some of the R-rated movies that we've seen.

Steve

Absolutely.

Nic

It's more of like a PG-15.

Steve

Yeah, I could see that. Yeah.

Nic

I feel like I could watch this with my kid because some of the real thing, the things that make it R-rated, I don't care about language. And the violence is not so graphic and cruel that it would like disturb her.

Steve

Yeah. Last week we watched Total Recall and we talked about that. And that's a Verhoeven. And Verhoeven is deliberately and over the top gruesome and gory with his violence that's like in his style. It is that is the opposite of James Cameron's style. James Cameron's style is much more about, yeah, there's action, there's people getting killed left and right, lots of gunplay, whatever, but we're not getting close-ups of exploding heads or anything like that, like we do with like a John McTiernan movie or a Paul Verhoeven movie, something like that. Yeah, I agree with you, PG-15 is a pretty accurate kind of way to think about this, I think.

Nic

And yeah, this is great. And I was super psyched to re-watch it. And I watched this with my wife. She enjoys it. I mean, like you said, James Cameron is so palatable, it's so crowd-friendly that it's hard to not just have a big-ass smile on your face the whole time. So I can't wait to talk to you about this.

Steve

All right, let's jump into the facts on True Lies. All right, True Lies was released on July 15, 1994 with an R rating and a running time of 141 minutes, actually the longest movie we've done so far. Directed by James Cameron, written by James Cameron, but I found this interesting, written by James Cameron, based on a screenplay by Claude Zidi, Simon Michael, and Didier Kaminka. So apparently there was a screenplay of this movie, but then Cameron basing it off that screenplay wrote enough of a different screenplay and a different story to be the sole credited writer on the movie that was actually made. Wow. But then had to include the based upon had to be included there by Writers Guild rules. All right, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Tom Arnold. Scores on Rotten Tomatoes, 77%, respectable. On IMDb, also respectable, 7.3. We kind of hit that, between 7.1 and 7.5 seems to be our wheelhouse. A lot of movies hit in that area on IMDb.

Nic

I mean, it kind of seems to be IMDb's wheelhouse for the most part.

Steve

We got a split decision from the critics Siskel and Ebert, with a thumbs up from the homie Roger and a thumbs down from the punk ass bitch, Gene. All right, awards, quite a lot of them actually. So no Oscar wins, but a nomination in 1995 for visual effects, great. Several wins at the 1995 Saturn Awards, best actress for Jamie Lee Curtis, best director for James Cameron, and best special effects. Then at the 1995 American Comedy Awards, Jamie Lee Curtis also won funniest lead actress in a motion picture. And at the '95 Golden Globes, she won best lead actress in a comedy. So Jamie Lee Curtis kind of cleaned up. Yeah. Saturn Award, Golden Globe, American Comedy Awards, all that. It was also nominated for five MTV Movie Awards, but did not win any of those little astronaut guys. On a $115 million budget, which, yeah, nothing says James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 90s, like over $100 million budget, that's for sure. The box office take, $379 million, 3.3 times what it cost to make, which, while not a huge multiplier, I mean, almost $400 million, huge blockbuster.

Nic

Oh, for sure. Yeah.

Steve

To look at it any other way. So those are the facts. On true lies.

Nic

One thing about Cameron and the budgets real quick.

Steve

Yeah, yeah.

Nic

I remember hearing an interview with him. I think it was when the second Avatar came out and they were talking.

Steve

About like, how do you how do.

Nic

You justify spending $1,000,000,000 making a movie? He's like, I don't think you understand what happens with the movie's budget. I get that money and then I give it to people. You're right. This is an economy where money is moving around. It's not just me taking $1,000,000,000.

Steve

It's like, no, no, you don't understand. Like, that's not going in my pocket. And it's not just going to like my company. Like I'm hiring, especially for a movie like Avatar, right? I'm hiring thousands of craftspeople and experts and artisans and et cetera, and they're all plying their craft and getting paid well to do it. Stop complaining, essentially.

Nic

It's really just, I always like that.

Steve

It's like routing money from the studio to actual people of talent, right?

Nic

That's exactly it, right.

Steve

All right, let's kick off True Lies here. So we open up nice cold open. Well, not really a cold open, because we do get the title card ahead of time, but the movie starts off We are told we are at Lake Chapeau in Switzerland. And I love this because it's Switzerland, and I've always loved Switzerland in one particular way, which is it's almost doesn't have a culture of its own, and I'm sure anybody out there listening, Swiss will hate me for this, but- It's culturally neutral. It is, but it's equally seemingly influenced by German, Italian, and French cultures. All three languages are officially spoken throughout the country. And so we have, in this thing, we have people speaking German, like guards speaking German, signs in German, but then like when he goes in like a little bit, talks to like a, He's catering staff. He speaks in French. And that's correct. And it's just funny to me that this happens. But we're in Switzerland.

Nic

It's a funny kind of typecasting based on the job. Of course, the cook is French, and the guard is German.

Steve

There you go. That's a good point. Exactly. So the first thing we see is there's this gate into this chateau that's on the lake, but it actually is on the water, which is frozen over. It's the winter. And so we kind of pan down underneath the water, and there is a man in a scuba suit with an underwater blowtorch that is cutting his way through, which is really cool. Any kind of underwater torch on earth.

Nic

Underwater plus fire explosion is always gonna work for me.

Steve

Absolutely.

Nic

Yeah. And he gets through whatever he needs to get through. So this place has crazy security if they have a gate under the water to even approach the moat of the property.

Steve

Yeah, very highly secured chateau up in Switzerland. But basically, Arnold Schwarzenegger pops up out of the water, he uses a knife to cut through the ice and kind of pops up, and he gets through. And this is the first time we see Tom Arnold. He is in a van nearby on surveillance, basically telling Schwarzenegger, like, Schwarzenegger's character is Harry, Harry Tasker. Tom Arnold plays Gibb, I think his name is like Albert Gibb. He's called Gibb. And so he's basically being the eyes and ears for Harry while he goes on this mission. I love one of my favorite things in this early movie is when he pulls off this wetsuit and it's just a perfect tuxedo underneath it. None of it's wet. It's perfectly everything. And he's got a really cool wet bag with a bunch of stuff in it, like the backpack thing. I love all the little tech in this movie. It's really great.

Nic

And I love being able to look perfect after that situation. And we see, you know, there's definitely the James Bond element. And like this opening sequence is very influenced by several James Bond films.

Steve

Incredibly, yes, absolutely. And we'll get to the specifics on that in a minute. But yeah, so he's got that. And one of the things I love too, so he goes into this hotel, he goes in or the chateau, whatever, he goes in through kind of a service entrance. So he's in through the kitchen and he comes out and that's when he's like stopped by, you know, like a chef or like, you know, excuse me, Monsieur, you know, whatever. And that's he speaks perfect French to him about basically like, What is this food? Do you serve this to your dog? Get this out of here. Start all over or something like that. Which is like, who would listen to anybody? Everybody there's in a talks, this doesn't look important. What's going on?

Nic

But you just have to act confident. It's the act like you belong there kind of approach. And if you can yell at the help, they're going to really think you belong there.

Steve

And speaking of that, he really is hiding in plain sight. He is being secretive by talking to everyone. Yeah, right? I mean, it's because in a situation like that, if you're slinking in the corner, avoiding people, that's what's going to... So he's like, Nice to see you again. And the guy's like, yeah, sure. Who is that?

Nic

Like, I always love the parties, like the formal events and the high ranking military guys get to wear all their medals and stuff. Do you think those guys are ever like, dude, I am so tired of people asking me if I've killed anyone. Can I just be Rick tonight? Can I just rent a suit? Can we go to Celix? This is terrible.

Steve

I don't think it's legal for them to own a suit.

Nic

No, you have to pin all the medals. That's right.

Steve

You got to put it on there still. Yeah. And so, So we see him go upstairs, and he kind of finds his way, or he actually finds his way to the second floor balcony, which is allowed. And he climbs up the outside to get to the third floor, which is like, nobody's supposed to be up there. And he basically puts a transmission device on this laptop, or not laptop, this desktop computer, which is running Windows 3.1, but they're there for a man named Khaled. And sure enough, the Windows logo is in Arabic, which I always love that little detail. But he connects that and he lets Tomer know, like, okay, you know, we're in, like, whatever, do your magic. And there's this other guy, I can't remember his name, in the van with them, who's like their assistant tech guy. And he starts trying to decrypt the hard drive or whatever to get a hold of these files. And this is the point, this is why they're there, is to apparently steal files from this Kaled guy.

Nic

Yeah, and I think Arnold then, he can let that run. He doesn't need to monitor it the whole time. So he gets out of that room.

Steve

He creates a connection, basically.

Nic

Right. On the floor, they're not supposed to be.

Steve

Yes.

Nic

And he's immediately approached by a guard as he walks out the door. And I love this scene. This is an excellent detail is he says something in Arabic, you know, whatever, I have to take a major leak. And in parentheses in the subtitles, it says perfect Arabic.

Steve

Right.

Nic

And I love that so much. Like, that's just one of those things that just really pushes this movie.

Steve

And I think that it's but it's I agree with you. And I also think it's super important for us to recognize that the idea here, I think, is that he used perfect slang. And I think that's what it's trying to indicate, right? It's specifically about taking a major leak. It's a weird thing to say, but.

Nic

To do it in a way that's different.

Steve

Yeah, that's I think the indication they would say. It was really great, but I love it. Yeah, too. It's not just a subtitle. It's imperfect, I remember. Yeah, in parentheses.

Nic

Just to let us know. Oh, no, this guy is good. This guy's believable.

Steve

So he heads back downstairs, back to the party. He needs to get out, but before he can, he is chatting with a woman. He's looking at some art pieces, trying to avoid detection from the guards who are now looking around for him.

Nic

Because they discovered the ice had been broken.

Steve

That's right, outside. And so, well, actually that's not yet. No, that's in a little bit. This is still just the original guy he talked to about where to go to take a leak, calls down to the guards, like, Hey, keep an eye on this guy.

Nic

Okay, good.

Steve

But he's kind of again hiding in plain sight in the party. But the woman he's talking to is, her character's name is Juno Skinner, played by Tia Carrere. And I got to say, the hold this woman had on me in the 90s, between Wayne's World, Wayne's World 2, this, Cole the Conqueror, which was a terrible Kevin Sorbo movie, but she's gorgeous in it.

Nic

Showdown in Little Tokyo, great Dolph Lundgren, Brandon Lee vehicle. Yeah, she's great in that.

Steve

This is, yeah, the hold this woman had on me in the 90s is remarkable.

Nic

Yeah.

Steve

Gorgeous woman. But yeah. So he is now being told, hey, you know, you got to get out of there. And this is, I think, now they see the ice broken and the alarm gets sounded, and this is Tom Arnold is now like, hey, Harry, you gotta get out of there. It's time to go now. No more. And he goes to Juno and he goes, Do you tango? And they start a very sexy tango. And I love one of my favorite Tom Morello lines early is he goes, Ballsy. Stupid, but ballsy.

Nic

His commentary is nice. And I always like the scenario of the guys in the van. Because you never really get the boring all business guy. It's always, oh, you're a wisecracker. You're gonna be an in-the-van tech guy.

Steve

Exactly.

Nic

Yeah, so this tango is happening, and as the guards are kind of all closing in, and they're looking around, and they're suspicious of him, and at some point he decides, like, All right, I'm just going through the front door. Like, I'm gonna leave through the front door. On his way out of the front door, they asked to see his invitation. And he basically, you know, pushes this button on his cigarette pack and creates a big explosion. So now he's off.

Steve

He had, like, planted a bomb by, like, the boathouse near where he came up out of the lake, or whatever. He had this, like, little thing. He put it there. But I love a guy who goes like, Excuse me, sir, can I see your invitation? Sure, here's my invitation. And that's when he presses the button, everything blows up. And then this is the way, so now we get the official, and I know this is a 90s movie with the official guard dog of the 80s, the Doberman Pinscher. Two of them run at him, and they're clearly gonna catch him. I mean, it's hard to run through the snow. Dobermans are much lighter. They're gonna get-- so he turns around and does the funniest thing ever when the two dogs jump at him, and he basically catches their heads in his two hands and slams their heads together. Which is great, 'cause it doesn't kill the dogs, but it disorients them enough that after they land and shake it off, they're still not able to really chase him. There's like, no, no, no, I'm done.

Nic

And he smashes the dog's head. He goes, Stay.

Steve

Stay.

Nic

To the point, okay, and one thing about Two Dads, One Movie is we are never wrong. So the Doberman is the official attack dog of the 80s in the United States. Oh, as we know, culturally, Europe is often a decade behind, which is why they love, you know, Mr. T in 2004 or whatever the fuck. So I think in Europe, the Doberman was the current official attack dog of the 90s.

Steve

So it took the 90s to get them Blue Jeans, MTV, and Dobermans, right? They had to wait for the Rottweiler to come later.

Nic

Oh, for sure.

Steve

Yeah. Got it. Got it.

Nic

Yeah, they got Trans Am's in 1998.

Steve

Yeah.

Nic

So, but this scene, this scene is excellent. Okay, so he's taken off after taking the dogs out and he's running down this snowy hill. And the guards that are coming after him have got motherfucking skis and they look so cool. Machine guns and skis.

Steve

I don't remember, is it the opening of Under Magsty Secret Service? It's a couple of the James Bond movies, I think, have this element.

Nic

Yeah, I know.

Steve

What's the one nobody likes?

Nic

A view to a kill. There's one nobody likes that Christopher Walken was the bad guy.

Steve

That's right, and that was Roger Moore, I think, right?

Nic

Yes, it was the Roger Moore returning for that one.

Steve

The old Roger Moore one, yeah, he was too old for it.

Nic

But the guys on skis coming down really cool, and snowmobiles and stuff. And this pursuit down the hill as the van that Tom Arnold and the other guy are driving is trying to catch up and be at the right spot for him as he's going down the hill.

Steve

We should also mention at this point that Harry Tasker is a Deadeye rival rivaled only by John Wick. The number of single pistol shots that are taking guys out while he's, you know, fire, you know, guns are being fired at him left and right, not hitting him. And he is just one, two, you know, bang, bang, bang, bang. And there's far dead guys. Like, it's just really. He's a complete dead eyes. Super accurate.

Nic

Yeah. And it. Yeah, it doesn't slow play his skill set.

Steve

No, the film at all. It's quite clear this is Superman.

Nic

Yeah.

Steve

We're supposed to believe this is Superman. This is the American James Bond. This is, you know, the secret agent of secret agents, essentially. Yeah.

Nic

And they end up getting out of there. Right as he gets in the van, he's like, Aw, duck, and takes out a couple of the last two guys right in front of the driver.

Steve

I will say, too, though, on the trip down the hill, we get the first of many. And this is like, I have very few complaints about this movie, but one of them that I do have is Arnold Stunt Double. He shows up a lot. He is really obviously visible in a lot of this movie. There are a lot of complicated stunts that obviously Arnold was not going to do. He probably got, 15 or 20 million to do this movie and they weren't gonna have him do any stunts and that makes sense. But the stunt double they got for Arnold, I have two problems with one. They clearly tried to rubber mask him at some point to make it a little more like Arnold's face when you're gonna see it more. And you can really tell this one in particular can really tell the rubber mask. The second one is his arms aren't nearly big enough. So there are several points, especially late in the movie where he is in a ripped shirt and like hanging from a helicopter. Yeah. Where you can really tell the dude's arms are about half as big as they need to be. But anyway, this was the first indication I wrote down where I was like, oh man, that stunt Stunt double shot wasn't great. That wasn't the back of his head. We got a good look at his face and that was a rubber mask.

Nic

Yeah, those are always tough with the stunt double shots. Stupid HG HD has ruined it. We were supposed to watch this on a 13-inch kitchen countertop CRT TV. Yeah, so they make it out of there. We made our flight.

Steve

That's right.

Nic

And now Gib and Harry are pulling back up in front of Harry's house and getting back into his cover life mode. Oh, here, don't forget, it's your wedding ring. Here's your stuff. Here's the souvenirs that you bought for the kids on our business trip. Trip and stuff. And Harry is so bummed out to return to his boring ass life in a five bedroom house married to Jamie Lee Curtis.

Steve

Oh, my God.

Nic

What a nightmare, right?

Steve

Absolute nightmare. Jesus. In, like, Suburban DC and, like, a gorgeous part of the DMV, probably, like, Alexandria, Virginia, some wonderful little suburb, beautiful big house, gorgeous wife who's clearly very interested in him still, right? You know, is, wants to be engaged with him. He is totally checked out as both a father and a husband and, you Obviously that becomes a major point of the plot here, but yeah, it's obvious early that he is very checked out. Gib brings a pack of cigarettes that has a little tiny camera in it and puts it up on the mantle and then puts his jacket on the back of a chair within view of it. And then the idea is you can use sunglasses to see out of that camera. And he shows them to Harry because he's come to pick him up in the morning for work. And he's like, Hey, you know, check these out. And he's looking. And that's when Dana, the daughter, played by Eliza Dushku, sneaks around and steals cash out of Gibb's wallet or whatever in his jacket. And he's like, She's stealing from you! And he's like, I knew it! Gibb knew it! And then we get the-- Here's the thing I wish there was more of. We get the shitty boyfriend who shows up on the motorcycle, because she's 14, by the way. So she's a freshman in high school. Too young to be picked up by your boyfriend on a motorcycle. I'm sorry. But we don't get him again. There's no-- no, yeah. It seems like Arnold beats his ass or anything, you know what I mean?

Nic

Yeah, he could have shown up again. A couple great Tom Arnold, well, one great Tom Arnold thing here. So the scene that we're in now is the morning after he was dropped off, right? And Elijah Dushku is in her motorcycle helmet. And Tom Arnold says, Boy, I remember the first time I got shot out of a cannon. He has like a 65% hit rate in this movie, but that was one of his good lines. I like him in this movie. But sometimes he makes jokes that don't even work in the movie. Like they're intentionally not gonna work.

Steve

But I count those as successes for him as an actor and a comedian. If you tell the joke in a way that falls flat, yeah.

Nic

Sorry. So Gibb's jokes work like- There you go.

Steve

Yeah, I got you. Yeah.

Nic

One other thing that always gets me, and we see this all the time, is the old people music being enjoyed by young people. Because Elijah Duschkevich is listening to some cover version of Sunshine of youf Love by Cream, which was a song from the mid-sixties. I don't think the kids in the '90s are like, Yo, is that Ginger Baker? Like, they weren't as into that kind of stuff. So that's one thing I always enjoy.

Steve

Somebody in the mid-'90s covered Moondance, right? There was a huge hit from the early '70s. There was a lot of that, like '70s and '60s, getting, like, repurposed for us in the '90s, and a lot of that was...

Nic

But, like, everyone spending the money to make this movie likes Cream. They don't like Badfinger or whatever band was covering it. Fair enough. So, oh, and another Tom Ardel line that was funny is, She's probably stealing money to pay for an abortion.

Steve

Such an asshole. He's probably banging motorcycle guy or whatever. So we get to work, they arrive at work, we're in DC, and we get this big, like, you know, there's a big diagram or emblem on the floor and it says Omega Sector, which of course is not a real thing, but this is supposed to be like, you know, I'm guessing it's the deep cover of the CIA or something like that, right? It's the secret MI5 kind of thing or MI6, whatever the the James Bond thing is same idea. It's just like a, you know, more secret. And their boss, who they're now getting, giving a debrief on this Switzerland mission to, is Charlton Heston. Yep. Looking great, looking almost exactly like that era's comic book, Nic Fury, dude, like with the scars and the eyepatch and everything. And obviously Nic Fury was reimagined in the, I think, either late 90s or very early 2000s in the comic books as a black man. And then when we got the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they cast Samuel L. Jackson. It really solidified that as the quintessential Nic Fury thing. But the original Nic Fury from the '50s and on into the '90s was always a white guy with gray hair and a bunch of scars on his face and an eyepatch. That was the standard look. So it's clear there's no way Cameron was not referencing Nic Fury with Charlton Heston's character design.

Nic

I love the eyepatch as a visual. Who are some of your favorite eyepatch guys?

Steve

Snake Plissken. Yeah. He's probably my favorite. And actually sticking with Kurt Russell, Captain Ron as well, actually.

Nic

Oh, that's right. He did double eyepatch roles. Do you think he had the rule like Pierce Brosnan where it's like, you,'re James Bond, you can't be in a tuxedo in anything else. So like, look, Kurt, as long as we're doing the escape from blank frame, you can't wear an eyepatch.

Steve

I don't think Carpenter would ever be that way. That's a much more Albert R. Broccoli kind of move than a James John Carpenter move.

Nic

But eyepatch always works. And it's like a small, like 90s fashion style eyepatch.

Steve

Very tiny.

Nic

You know, I was like, dude, you can get more coverage than that.

Steve

It almost looks like the eyepatch version of Joe Pesci's glasses in Moonraker or Moonwalker.

Nic

Yeah, these little tiny eyepatch things. Also Slick Rick, the rapper, great. Oh, there you go. But yeah, so kind of the plot of it is they're finding out this billionaire who Arnold was trying to get information from at this party at the beginning, we found that he is transferred money to this bank that's known to be kind of a payment hub for terrorist activities. So that's a hundred million tons of crazy amount of money there. And at the same time, there were four warheads stolen from Kazakhstan.

Steve

That's right.

Nic

So my wife. Yeah. So that's, that's where we're at with their.

Steve

Right. And Heston, Charles, this is not, not all that impressed. He's like, this is not blowing up my skirt, boys, whatever. He's like, you know, not enough info. Do you have anything concrete? Like, whatever. So they're going to investigate. Because it turns out, oh, that Juno Skinner that you met at the party, Tia Carrere's character, oh, she's an antiquities dealer, and she works closely with Khaled, and she just brought in a ton of money's worth of new antiquities into the country for him, and he paid her from this account, which normally he pays all of his antiquities stuff from this other account. So now we want to dig in on her.

Nic

Art and collectibles are so ripe generally for money laundering, tax fraud, all that stuff. So it's the perfect Because how much.

Steve

You spend, if you overspend on art, who's really gonna call you out on it, right? No one's gonna call you out on it, right? Exactly. Yeah. So anyway, but yeah, so they decide, okay, we got to investigate her. So he goes, so he had played the character at that Swiss chateau of Harry Renquist. I always love keeping the same first name as part of your cover because it just makes it less likely that somebody's gonna slip up or whatever. I always love that.

Nic

We talked about that in another episode too, and I think that's a great point. If someone says, Hey, Harry, then you'll at least look up.

Steve

It was Sneakers, I think, Martin versus Martin, whatever his other name was, or whatever. But yeah, so they're gonna go investigate. So he shows up at her place of business or whatever, and reintroduces himself essentially, like, Harry Rehnquist, and they chat for a while. She's kind of giving him a tour, and they go into this big open warehouse room where there's clearly antiquities being opened out of crates and different restoration maybe projects happening, all this kind of stuff. And the first thing I noticed is like, Man, a couple of the guys working here are really buff, way more than you'd expect from dudes working in an antiquities thing. Like, that's so strange. And we get this sort of like, we get, Harry is eyeballed by one of, you know, the guys that are standing there in kind of a suspicious way. So there's a little bit of foreshadowing.

Nic

Yeah, they're way there. Their faces are way too in focus at this point for them to not become important.

Steve

We can tell that they're in the plot. These characters are in the plot. Yeah.

Nic

And sure enough, you know, after Harry and Juno have their conversation, one of the workers basically walks back into her office, like, can I talk to you for a minute? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other person leaves, he closes the door, he slaps her across the face. So he's clearly not who he's supposed to be. He slaps her twice. I know that was just acting, but, sir, I do not like you for that. That's RTA Carrera.

Steve

That's right, exactly. Yeah, so Gibb and Harry are driving, and Gibb says, Hey, we're being followed. Three cars back, one lane over, whatever. So they decide to try and figure out who's following them and why. They pull over and Harry's got that pack of cigarettes that he had earlier with the sunglasses. He's able to like watch behind himself as he goes. So he walks into this like shopping mall basically and two guys two of the guys from the antiquities thing follow him.

Nic

Yeah, and when he first gets out of the car, this I thought was interesting because we're just shown a scene where Harry as part of his cover has to have like an incredible wealth of knowledge about like a certain era of art.

Steve

Oh, yeah.

Nic

Like all this stuff that you do to be like a good spy, right? You have to learn all this shit. And then he steps out of the car, lights a cigarette, and is like choking on it. You are way more likely to have to pretend to be a guy who smokes cigarettes than you are to be a guy who knows about this kind of art, right? That should be like, oh, I gotta do cigarette class for the CEO.

Steve

Or learn how to just puff and make it look decent. Like, don't inhale, you know what I mean? You won't cough if you just puff, yeah.

Nic

But yeah, he is being followed now, and we are really in for a treat here.

Steve

So he heads into this mall, finds his way to a bathroom, and is able to set up the, you know, he knows he's being followed 'cause he's watching, he's holding that little pack, pack of cigarettes. So the camera's behind him. He knows he's being followed. He goes into a bathroom, sets it up so that it's showing his back. He goes to take a leak at the urinal, and, like, the first guy follows, you know, goes in and kind of like, I think he's there just to, like, make sure that there's nobody else around. Then the other guy, the kind of bigger dude, comes in with the pistol with the silencer on and ready to just blow his head off. These guys clearly not interested in, like, investigating who he is. They just want to go on, you know, but, of course, because he's able to see him. He moves the last second and starts a big fight, and he kills the one guy. And it's a good gunplay, and there's a lot of punching and people being slammed into things.

Nic

The toilet's breaking. The water spraying everywhere. And then he's able-- and during this time, this is a great comedic element of this movie, 'cause they're really-- they pay attention to making sure that there are funny beats throughout this film. And there's a guy who's like-- innocent dude who's just trying to take a dump.

Steve

Older guy, yeah.

Nic

So the whole thing's getting shot up around him. Arnie finally ends the last guy by like slamming his face into the urinal and flushing it and he says, Cool off.

Steve

Yeah, cool off. But while this fight's been happening. No, go ahead.

Nic

Oh, no, I just want to say that this scene here, the toilet's breaking.

Steve

Yeah.

Nic

And then the next scene here where the bad guys are kind of shooting at Tom Arnold. Right. And he's hiding behind a like a metal light post. The sound of the bullets there and the sound of the toilets breaking are so nice.

Steve

Nice.

Nic

As a fully aficianado, I really, really so that explains to me why it was up for all these awards.

Steve

Yeah. And then there you go. And then so, and Gibb gets involved because he's watching Salim, the head bad guy, who's stayed in the car. He's keeping an eye on him until like a while this fight's going on in the bathroom, until a bus shows up between them. And when the bus pulls away, Salim is gone.

Nic

Right.

Steve

And so now Gibb's got to go after him. Salim's got like a machine gun with him. He busts in on the bathroom after Harry's already taken out the other guys. He hasn't killed the second guy. The one he slammed into the toilet or the urinal, but he's cuffing him and whatever, and he picks him up to use him as a human shield. When Salim comes in, there's more fighting, and there's more gunplay, and it's going on and on. And then, so he starts escaping, Salim does when he loses, I think, runs out of bullets or whatever, has to change. He decides to get away. It's too much for him. He ends up jumping through a window, like Eddie Murphy getting tossed through it in Beverly Hills Cop.

Nic

It seems so easy to do, based on recent films we've watched. I feel like I could just hop through a window I don't think it would work out well for me. And I'm a big guy. I think I'd bounce off it.

Steve

Yeah, I don't want to find out personally. I'm not interested. But that's when now Gib is out there and something blows through the window behind him. And that's when he kind of hides behind this skinny light post.

Nic

Yes.

Steve

Right. And has to like, and is shocked himself that he doesn't get hit by anything.

Nic

Yeah, and that's another great gag. And it's the classic, like the comedian bit of you move the microphone stand. If you're like really fat, you move it to the side and you say, oh, let me move this so you can see me. So yeah, Tom Arnold sneaking behind and he checks his body and then finally checks his dick because that's number one.

Steve

Tommy Arnold. Big relief.

Nic

So Salim has now yoinked a guy off his motorcycle.

Steve

Brutally, but really, really impressive. Yeah, really clotheslines a guy.

Nic

That is right up there with Rambo taking the guy's bike in First Blood, where he stands in front of him and does the kind of like, going this way, you going this way, but so slick here and he takes it. I will say that during this scene, He takes like a regular, it's like a Kawasaki motorcycle, right? During the stunts, I feel like they kind of have to use the dirt bike, the official vehicle of crime, because I don't think that thing really has the suspension to go up the stairs and everything. They're very careful to not show the tires in the bike, like during a lot of those scenes.

Steve

Well, I think, again, this is a stuntman actor thing, and it happens for both Arnold and for the guy playing Selleck on this one. Because Arnold steal, Harry steals a horse, a cop's horse. He's like, a federal agent in pursuit of a suspect, and he knocks the cop off the horse and steals his horse, which would get you shot. But so now whenever you see the horse's feet and you can tell it's a real horse that's running, it's a stuntman, and it's a pretty obvious stuntman. And anytime you can see the motorcycle, the complete motorcycle, and it's doing anything other than sitting still, it's a stuntman.

Nic

For sure.

Steve

And then I think what they had is they had a mechanical horse, and a mechanical, like, you know, a top only of a motorcycle that was stationary and rocked, and they did green screen behind them for a lot of the other stuff. And that's when you see the actors. That's my take. It's what it's-- I was trying to figure it out because you never see for sure Arnold on the for sure horse unless the horse is still. You do see a couple where he's just sitting on it and it's just there, but anytime it's galloping or whatever, it's not Schwarzenegger on there. And so I think that's sort of the thing. I think you're right that the sort of close-ups are partly so because, yeah, the motorcycle wouldn't be able to do that. To do that part of it, I wouldn't be equipped to kind of do the stairs and do some of the other stuff. But it's a great horse versus motorcycle chase. And I love, you know, Harry the whole time is like, Sorry, sorry, sorry, excuse me, sorry. Like, over-- He's apologizing to everybody that he's blowing past or having to jump through their carts at the mall or whatever. Like, yeah.

Nic

He is so courteous, and I really enjoy that, too. Like, he's causing all this havoc and all this damage, but his manners are still intact.

Steve

Yeah, exactly.

Nic

He's still a gentleman spy when it comes down to it.

Steve

Exactly.

Nic

There's a scene where there's like a quartet or whatever playing in the lobby of this building and the motorcycle zooms by them and they're all looking. And then before you see the horse come, the guy playing the saxophone, you hear him like squeal into the sax. He like screams into the saxophone and then the horse bellows through. I love that beat.

Steve

Excuses me.

Nic

Oh my God.

Steve

It's the lobby of the Marriott Hotel. It's a big high rise Marriott.

Nic

Okay.

Steve

That's where they are. And so yeah, this is like playing in the lobby. Lobby, this quartet, or there was clearly an event occurring. And so Salim gets on one elevator with the motorcycle and kind of takes a hostage, or at least somebody that he can hide behind this woman. And then Harry gets with the horse into another elevator. And they're these really great glass elevators that go real high. And with this old couple, clearly old rich couple in a tuxedo and an evening gown, the horse barely fits in there. And so now they're sort of following up. He goes, you put button for the top floor, please. You know, that kind of thing. And finally the woman like turns to her husband and goes, you, should say something, you know? And he just goes, that's a fine animal. Yeah.

Nic

And then the horse's tail whips his wife in the face right after that.

Steve

Oh my God. So yeah.

Nic

Yeah, so they make it to the roof now and Salim's basically gets to the edge, sees what his surroundings are and decides, screw it, I'm taking my motorcycle and I'm going off the building. Into a pool on the neighboring building.

Steve

Yeah.

Nic

Which, which his knowledge of physics is incredible. His calculations on the fly are really off the charts.

Steve

There's got to be some combination of, like, the speed of the motorcycle and the height difference between the buildings that makes this work. Yeah. Right. And distance. But it doesn't look right. No, it looks like he goes way too far laterally. You know what I mean? It's like, yes, he drops a long ways. It's not like he's trying to jump across to something that's the same height. You know, he's. It's a much smaller building that he's jumping over to where the pool is, but it really looks. That's not possible. It doesn't even look like it's across the street. It almost looks like another block down. It looks far away.

Nic

It does look far away. And there's not like, and it is jumping onto a lower thing, but there's no incline or anything. I would have loved at least just one of those, where did that ramp come from type scenes that we always see.

Steve

Exactly. Some construction equipment laying around, a big piece of plywood near the edge. But yeah, so Harry watches Salim make this jump and goes, we can do this too, let's do it. Backs the horse up and is like pushing the horse forward to like make the same jump. And look, the motorcycle Shouldn't have been able to make it. A frigging horse is never going to build up the kind of speed necessary to do that. And the horse knows it. So the horse comes to a screeching halt. It's little hooves, you know, skidding along the ground, and he tumbles forward off the horse and is like hanging, you know, by the reins off the building. And luckily the horse is strong enough to like not just keep him there. In, in space, but pull him, you know, back up and pull him up.

Nic

But, you know, and then he has a, he has a very funny sequence here once he gets pulled up and he's, like, yelling, basically berating the horse for not jumping. He says, what kind of cop are you anyway?

Steve

It's a good one. Oh, man.

Nic

And in the meantime, so back home, it just showed it for a second, but his wife and daughter had been preparing for his birthday party. They were making him a cake and stuff.

Steve

That's right.

Nic

So, of course, he comes home super late, too late for his own party.

Steve

Yeah.

Nic

And they're, they're pissed.

Steve

Jamie Lee Curtis doesn't even seem that mad about it. She's, like, falling asleep at the table, but she doesn't seem that upset. She's like, oh, okay.

Nic

I mean, it's his birthday, not hers. True. It's not quite as bad, but I.

Steve

Also think it's just another indicator of her just getting used to, like, this is how things are. He's just checked out, and he's just not really participatory in the family stuff anymore. So, like, okay, what else, what else could I expect? I think it's kind of the vibe.

Nic

Yeah. And earlier in, like, the first morning that they were together, kind of getting ready, she made a, he asked her a question, and She was talking about, oh, the mechanic said this thing's going to cost this and that. And he was like, oh, it sounds good, honey. Clearly not listening. He said he'd knock $100 off if I slept with him. And he's just like, Sounds great, sweetie.

Steve

He literally says to me, Good thinking.

Nic

Just over it.

Steve

Nice work.

Nic

Watch me quickly signing on to online mechanic school to figure out how to get in on that. How many times on this set do you think Charlton Heston confused Salim the actor and then the other guy on the team.

Steve

More than once?

Nic

He's blaming it on the eyepatch.

Steve

He's like, oh, with this eyepatch, they all look the same. So we were back in the office and they're telling, you know, they've got to look at the guy, so now they're looking through dossier information, and sure enough, Harry spots, he's got a full beard, which he doesn't have in the present day. In the dossier photo, but he finds him and they find out this is a guy whose nickname is Salim al- something, whatever it is. But he's the head of Abu Aziz. There you go. And he is the head of a sort of terrorist faction called Crimson Jihad.

Nic

Kind of a sick name.

Steve

It's cool. And his nickname is the Sand Spider. And I love, because Charlton Heston asked, why do they call him the Sand Spider? And the guy's like, I don't know, because it sounds scary. Like, there's no good reason kind of thing. But so we establish who this guy is and that, yes, he is indeed like a real bad guy on a global scale, you know, the, the org, the agency that they're part of here already aware of him. They're, they're, they're taking it seriously, that kind of thing. Yeah. And so then Harry is like, man, I came home late last night. I gotta make it up to Helen. Right. And so he has Gib taken him over to Helen's office. She's like a paralegal or a legal secretary, something like that. And he, Gib drops him off or whatever, and he's like, you know, I'm gonna go talk to her and we're gonna have lunch together. And I love Gib's like, so I just stay here. He goes, yeah, buddy, stay here. Like, you know. But as he's walking to Helen's cubicle, her neighbor, whatever, gets a phone call, her little cube neighbor, and leans over and goes, It's your mystery man on line one, or whatever. And that's-- Harry stops and listens without being seen. And this is where we get introduced to the character Simon. And Simon is played by Bill Paxton with the douchebaggiest mustache ever. On him, it looks so creepy and not good. It's so bad.

Nic

He is-- he is so good at being. At just getting under your skin. He can capture the essence of, like, the worst kind of person. And randomly, before I watched this, like, a day before I watched this, I watched a weird science. Oh, where he plays chat the brother, which, again, is like an iconic version of the brother.

Steve

Absolutely.

Nic

Bill Paxton is. He must have been just the most likable guy in real life to be able to be such a.

Steve

Such a. I've heard. When you hear about Bill Paxton as someone that people had to work with or whatever, you know, he was never implicated in any kind of like wrongdoing or anything, you know, and a lot of people started calming out about those stories and yeah, apparently very, very friendly guy to be around on set. So not a surprise that, you know, he would be a good guy who could then turn around and play just the smartest assholes.

Nic

Yeah, so this character of Simon, I mean, so they're kind of watching her conversation. She's in this Chinese restaurant.

Steve

Yeah, that's right. Him. Yeah.

Nic

And they're listening in. Do they plant something on her?

Steve

So, yeah. So basically, like, Harry goes back to Gib and is like, is kind of like, you know, basically, because he doesn't, like, she leave, she leaves and he leaves before. Nothing happens then right away, except that she said, you know, she talks about, like, oh, I'll meet you and, like, whatever. And so then at dinner, like, he goes back out to Gib and is like, you know, like, this is what's happening. And Gib's kind of like, oh, man, you're always cheating on you. That's such, you know, hey, you got it better than I do. I love the sign. He goes, you got a better idea. I came home. My wife left me because she was with this guy, whatever. She took everything, man. She took everything. She took the ice cube trays out of the freezer. What kind of a sick bitch takes the ice cube trays out of the freezer? I love how indignant he is about the ice cube trays. But basically we then cut to dinner at the Tasker house and Harry asks, oh, I came by your office to take you to lunch. Oh, you must have just missed me. Oh, so and so needed this. And she tells this whole story about the Xerox machine being the wrong model for the disc that needed the thing printed Like, really, if you're gonna lie, don't lie with that much detail.

Nic

Advice to listeners, keep your lies brief.

Steve

It's just, so she goes on and on, and I love the way that it is like zooming in on him as he's getting so angry as she's like saying all this story. And that's, and then the next day when he's at work is when he tells Gib to tap Helen's phones.

Nic

That's right.

Steve

And then they also like put a bug in her purse.

Nic

That's right, okay, that's what it is. And they end up back meeting again.

Steve

That's right.

Nic

And Bill Paxton is telling her, He's basically presenting that he was the guy, the mystery person involved in the shootout at the hotel, bathroom fire, all this stuff, right? And Helen's like, oh, that's so impressive. And the way he says, I can't take credit, it's the training.

Steve

It's just, you react in a microsecond. You don't really have a time to think. And then, yeah, Gibb and Harry are listening in over the bug in the purse. And Aaron and Gibb in particular go, He goes, oh, man, this guy's taking credit for our work.

Nic

Give obviously likes this guy, because there's part of Gib in this. Simon is probably more like Gib than he is like Harry.

Steve

100%.

Nic

Yeah. So he's making Harry furious that he likes his shit. And at one point, he's like, oh, this keeps getting better. And Harry's watching through binoculars, and you just see one of the lenses pop. Like, he crushed it because he was.

Steve

Rolling him so hard.

Nic

Really good.

Steve

Yes. And so, yeah, I love, so one of the things I love about the, when they take the purse to bug it or whatever and to put a little thing in it, he has to toss it out to get Gib in the rain and then go retrieve it from walking the dog. And the dog is this one step up from a rat. It doesn't want to be on the walk in the rain. He is just having to drag it along with him so that he can have an excuse to go out and get the purse back from Gib. That dog is not happy.

Nic

No, not at all. Not at all. So he's gonna go confront Simon or gonna go see him in person.

Steve

Exactly.

Nic

And we get some great lines here.

Steve

Well, so Simon's a used car salesman. They follow him from the lunch, they follow him to his work. He's a used car salesman, the Corvette that he's driving, he immediately puts the for sale sign back at $17,999 or whatever for the Corvette. Great deal at the time if you could afford it. And so, you know, basically he's now going to go in and act like a, like a customer kind of get some information from this guy and, you know, go for it, because Simon. Yeah. Has got this whole tall tale that he spins who he's telling him about his whole gig, and there's a lot in there.

Nic

Yeah. And he's, like, immediately. I mean, I've met guys like this. We all know the guy who he wants more than anything for other people to think that he's cool at the expense of his reputation on the very real chance that the he's saying is not cool to. You.

Steve

Yeah, right.

Nic

You know, that's true. We're like, you're really bragging about some, some Niche there, buddy. Like, you're assuming a lot about me, so. Yeah, he's talking about, oh, yeah, you know, you need a car like this. He says, the vet gets them wet, which, you know, I always enjoy. That's what we say when we take our dog to get bathed at the veterinarians office. But when he's talking about his scheme. Yeah. Oh, and then I convinced the women. Oh, and I'm so good. And I got a meat out of my hands or whatever. And Arnie once in a while will say something to him, he's like, what about the husbands? And then Bill Faggs' response is dickless.

Steve

With like a hot dog in his mouth. He's like eating a hot dog or whatever.

Nic

Oh yeah, 'cause he first says, he first says, no, I'm not gonna tell you my thing when they're driving in the car. Cut to him eating a hot dog. All right, let me, he's like, Let.

Steve

Me lay it on you.

Nic

He's like worm and rounders, like eating the hot dog and breaking everything down. He says something about the bodies, He said, Her titties make you want to stand up and beg for buttermilk.

Steve

Yeah, what the fuck? Buttermilk is like clumpy, right? I mean, isn't buttermilk, like, I don't know. I don't want to think about it.

Nic

It's kind of a bags of sand style description, right? So it was really funny. So, you know, he's obviously, like, he's had some experience with this guy as he's talking shit.

Steve

And at one point, Harry daydreams of, you know, smashing his face and killing him or whatever. And then he's not dead, you know, which would have been smart.

Nic

But yeah, that's probably the gnarliest violence in the whole movie.

Steve

Honestly, it's a brutal hit.

Nic

It does like, you know, one hard backhand fist to the face that just takes them out.

Steve

It's really brutal. And so then I think we get the next day and Gibb has brought some pages of Helen's phone calls to Harry and he's like looking through them while they're driving in a GMC Jimmy, which by the way, I forgot how small SUVs were in the 90s. There's not an SUV available in the market today as small as this vehicle with these two men in it. It really is wild how enormous they both look inside this thing. But anyway, they're looking and he's looking at the pages and he stops and pulls the car over and he goes, Give me the missing page. It goes from page 9 to page 11. Give it to me now, whatever. And that's, of course, where there's a conversation between Helen and Simon where he's like, Meet me at 8:00 p.m. at the Key Street Bridge or something like that, whatever it is. And so now it's like they're gonna go, he looks, it's almost eight, right? And they check their tracker and it's like, well, she's still at the house. And then Gib's like, nah, man, the purse is at the house. Like, we gotta go. So they go and they're gonna check it out. We see Simon kind of pull up. So Helen is waiting for Simon. Simon pulls up and is, takes him to her safe, takes her to his safe house.

Nic

Yeah.

Steve

Which is a frickin trailer.

Nic

Piece of shit plays. And as he's pulling out, so he's got that same convertible again. And she gets in the car. He's like, oh, just keep your head down till we're out of the city. And she starts to kind of lean over towards the passenger door.

Steve

A little bit.

Nic

He's like, here, let me help you. And, like, shoves her. It's like, oh, this guy is so creepy.

Steve

Oh, so then they've sicked a few surveillance teams on him to keep an eye on him. There's, like, a helicopter and, like, they're all good. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Her head's in his lap. Oh, boy. Yeah.

Nic

And the safe house is super funny because he's He's explaining to you where he's like, oh yeah, there's too much heat in the penthouse in New York and this in Paris or whatever. So he takes her to the safe house, which is clearly just his like Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in America, Hollywood fucking trailer.

Steve

Exactly.

Nic

You know, really nice.

Steve

But he is telling her, I need your help for this op. Because he won't say mission. At one point she says mission, he goes, no, no, no, we call it an op. Very important that you say op. But yeah, so this next op is in Paris and he needs someone to come along with him. To be his wife, to play as his wife, because they'll be looking for a single man traveling alone. They won't be looking for a couple, which is also stupid. But he kind of like he's pouring her wine. I love, too, the clink of the wine glasses, which are clearly plastic. The first thing we see inside the trailer is them going clinking their glasses, cheersing, whatever, and it's this dull kind of noise. And I love that, because it's one more indication of how not baller this guy is.

Nic

Oh, yeah. And he's, and Simon just doing the worst imaginable Pepe La Pew impersonation, right? He's just climbing up on her and she, like, she seems like she 5% wants it, but it's pretty apparent by the time he gets close enough that.

Steve

Well, because she agrees, like, okay, I'll do it, you know, like, it's okay, okay, I'll do that. Like, it's important, whatever. And he goes, oh, it's very important that we, you know, look like two people that are in love with each other. And he, like, touches her knee and she reacts. He's like, oh, that could have gotten us both killed, you know, kind of thing. He's really laying it on. And what he, but when he starts kiss her, that's when she starts really pushing and pushing back and being like, I can't do this. I can't do this. This is too far. I can't do this. But in the meantime, Harry and Gib and all their little crew of surveillance, they've all descended upon the trailer and are getting ready to raid it, basically.

Nic

Yeah, and they've got face masks on. I mean, this is terrifying. And basically what they do is use the blowtorch, like the underwater blowtorch, to just take out the entire side of his trailer and flip it down.

Steve

Pull it down. Exactly. They're able to kind of kidnap them both. They put them in separate vehicles. I love as Helen is trying to get away, she ends up kicking Gib in the nuts, and then punching Harry, I think, and then another guy slaps or punches her, and Harry knocks him out. This is still my wife, dude.

Nic

And so they bring her to this really cool interrogation room. Yeah. Scary room behind it. Is it a one-way mirror or a two-way mirror? I never say that.

Steve

I think it's referred to as a two-way mirror because both sides give you the same view. Same view. So you're able to see the same view two ways. I think that's what it is. Yeah.

Nic

I'll just say if you're qualifying mirror with either one way or two way, I'll generally know what you're talking about.

Steve

Exactly.

Nic

Otherwise it's just a mirror.

Steve

Regardless. Irregardless. It's all the same. Yeah.

Nic

In, you know, they're asking her these questions and stuff and getting to the, the essence of, like, Helen just, like, wants to feel special because they're asking her, like, who's this guy? What are you doing? Then they get into questions. Their relationship.

Steve

Right, right. And it's totally fucked up. And he really just needs to talk to his wife. The whole thing is terrifying, bad.

Nic

It is, yeah, it's rough, it's rough. And then, you know, so they basically tell her, like, well, we have something for you.

Steve

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're in trouble, but you can get out of trouble by helping us, essentially, right?

Nic

And they give her this proposition of like, oh, you either help us or we kill your husband and your daughter. What is it? She's like, What the fuck are you talking about? Yeah, of course I can help you guys. That's something you don't see in these kind of movies a lot. Like some levity to that decision.

Steve

I also love the moment where they tell her, you'll be contacted and you'll be contacted by a man with the codename Boris. And your codename, and she goes, Natasha? Like Boris and Natasha, Rocky and Bullwinkle. They go, no, Doris. Boris and Doris. Oh my God.

Nic

And Simon, in the meantime, we have him. And they have him, like, you know, over a dam.

Steve

Yeah. Like the edge of a dam.

Nic

Dangling him over there, you know, to.

Steve

Make that Richard Kimble jump. Yeah.

Nic

And he folds immediately.

Steve

Oh, dude's a complete.

Nic

He's not trying to. He's like, oh, no, it wasn't me. I was just full. I'm nothing. I'm Naval Lin. I got a little dick. And he's just saying all this stuff about himself. I look incredibly fun before they go.

Steve

They realize he clearly isn't a threat. He's pissed himself. They're like, we've scared him enough. We're done. We can. It's like, you know, get the hell out of here, you know, whatever. And he's kind of like, where do I go? No, no, wait. If I turn around, you guys will shoot me as soon as I turn around. And I love that Gib just turns and goes, Get lost, dipshit, and just fires a few shots at the ground. Get lost, dipshit. Oh, my God.

Nic

All right. So now we have the assignment that Helen needs to complete. And she's basically told that, you know, there's this person who's not going to touch, like he wants a sexy lady or whatever, He's not going to touch you because thing is just watching, but you need to go get close to this guy.

Steve

And I love, we see before this, we see the recording occurring where there's a French person, an agent in their offices with a very heavy, he's a clearly French speaker, heavy accent, and he's saying things with this heavy accent, like, you know, turn around, take off your clothes, do it slowly, do it sexy, you know, whatever. And then he turns at one point, he turns out to Gib and he goes, who is this for? Is this for Le E? C'est la merde.

Nic

It's like, it's shit.

Steve

I love that. So, yeah, so they told her to wear something sexy, you know, be at this hotel at this time, you know, ask for, you know, a thing at the letter at the desk for Doris, like, you know, the whole thing. And then, but be sure to dress sexy. Yeah. And what she's wearing initially, at least, is not sexy. It is like a little black dress, but it's got all this, like, tulle, like sleeves, and a big collar, and a bunch of extra, you know, material down below, the hem and everything. And it looks very, like, a middle-aged housewife's ID. Idea of what looking sexy is. Oh, totally.

Nic

Helen's idea of what she wore as a bridesmaid to her sister's wedding.

Steve

Exactly.

Nic

Yeah, really good. But she is aware, or do they tell her that he likes it a certain way so she knows she has to change that.

Steve

It's once she gets there, she's given a phone number to call and a room key, and so she calls the phone number and it's Gibb, but with a voice modulator, and he basically says, you're a prostitute named Michelle. You go up to the room, and he goes, you don't expect anything. She's like, no, no, no. This is when he says he just likes to watch, but he's normal. You tell her, you're the normal girl, Chloe, or whatever, though, is not available. So now that she knows that she's a prostitute, she goes upstairs, sees herself in the mirror in, like, the hallway outside the suite, and realizes that she doesn't, she doesn't look like a prostitute. You know what I mean? So this is when she does a little, like, hallway tailoring. She takes her glasses off. She rips all the, like, tool, all the, like, whatever, off of, like, the sleeves, the Hem, everything. It turns it into a very accurately. Well, it's.

Nic

I think the dress was probably constructed.

Steve

I think it maybe even she made the dress or something. We could, like, posit potentially, but, yeah, the idea is that it, they're pretty separated. She's ripping along the seams to do this stuff, but she, I mean, it turns into a very sexy little black dress. She takes water out of the flower pot to, like, Slick her hair back, and then she doesn't. So she's, she's doing a good job of, like, making it look like she would look the part. Like, she gets it.

Nic

Oh, yeah.

Steve

Right. She definitely is, is understanding the assignment, in that sense, definitely.

Nic

And she shows up now in this room, and in the corner there's a figure in the shadows who's sitting there. And he's basically, that's far enough, and starts communicating to her using the videotape with some Kevin McCallister level skills operating the rewinding and fast forwarding. I mean, he's doing great at it at first.

Steve

I think that some of the least believable stuff in any of the movies that we've covered, and we've covered movies with aliens and sci-fi technology, The least believable shit is people being able to fast forward and rewind to specific points in tapes.

Nic

Yeah.

Steve

At will. I just don't buy it. It's like, it almost takes me out of the moment in the movie anytime that happens. It's like, fuck you. That is not, I have tried to do shit like that. It is impossible.

Nic

He would need like a sampler the size of a large pizza box on his lap to like have all the buttons for the stuff he needs to say to get it timed right.

Steve

If it was far enough in the future where we were talking about about a mini disc or something digital, and you had tracks that you could jump back and forth. I'd buy it. Because then it's like each little phrase could be the next track, and you'd know you just need to skip back to do that one again, or something like that. That I could get. But a tape? Come on.

Nic

Too manual.

Steve

No. But anyway, he basically tells her to take the dress off and dance, basically. And look, she looks amazing. This is what, 11? After trading places, but she hasn't missed a beat. She looks great. And the dance is legendary. It's a legendary striptease. It's about two minutes long. I can't tell if there's music playing or if in the world of the music, she's just dancing and we are getting music to make it less weird, but where would that music have come from? I don't think it was diegetic. I don't think it was in the scene. So she's dancing to no music.

Nic

The awkwardness of her dancing might suggest no music.

Steve

Yeah, and-- Right.

Nic

'Cause also, like, it is very sexy. She looks amazing. She's really funny during this. There's a few physical comedy things that have to happen there. And she does a great job of living in these two worlds at once.

Steve

Even the moment before she gets into the suite, there's a moment as she's walking towards it, and we see her full body from her heels up, and her ankle buckles a little. She's not used to wearing tall heels like that. I love that kind of stuff. That is so perfect, because you know damn well Jamie Lee Curtis could walk in any size heel she wants. Perfectly. But she did that just right to make it look like her character was uncomfortable.

Nic

Yeah, those awkward things there. And this is a good, yeah, this is a long scene. This is almost halfway through the movie. It's kind of like an intermission for horniness. It's like the let's go, this is the hole in the popcorn bucket moment for all you fellas out there. But man, this is very well done and it builds to the point Right.

Steve

We're basically like, so now Harry is telling her to lay down on the bed and close her eyes and she's kind of like, oh, you know, I told you nobody said they would do anything. Well, she obviously doesn't know it's Harry. He's gonna go up and he starts like rubbing, like, not rubbing, but like, you know, placing like a rose, like along her lips and like down her chest and everything.

Nic

He's kind of doing the face off thing.

Steve

Doing a little bit, that's true. Not with his hands, thankfully, but with the rose petal or the rose bud. And so he's doing that, but she is like, you know, convinced this is some other dude and she's not about to bang anybody for anybody. So she reaches over and grabs the telephone off of the nightstand and just slams him across the face a couple times before realizing, Harry, like, you know, whatever. But of course, as soon as that happens, Q Salim and the bad guys, they are busting down the door and grabbing them both. And this is a great dynamic briefly where Helen believes that she is there on a real secret mission and therefore is the target of this attack because Harry's just a computer salesman. It couldn't be him. And so she keeps telling him, Harry, let me take care of this. Harry, be quiet. Let me. And she's. And he's like, she's a crazy. Like, leave her alone. You don't need the hooker. You just need me. Like, whatever. It's very funny.

Nic

Yeah. Such a smart way to. To keep this going here. And one thing is when she hits him with the phone.

Steve

Yeah.

Nic

He makes the Arnie sound, and that would be one thing that would tip me off, right? Like, if it was me, I'd be like, but, you know. And after, like, five of those, she still doesn't realize it's. Him yet.

Steve

I also on that topic, but back just a bit when we were in the two-way mirror interrogation room and he's doing the talking. And I know there's a voice modulation. So it sounds like this. But wouldn't it still sound like, you know, like, like he says, you know, like, do you still love your husband? Would it be like, do you still love your husband? And wouldn't it sound like his delivery?

Nic

Extract your accent.

Steve

Yeah, exactly. It should be so obvious. This is sort of like this. I could eat a peach for hours. Oh, God. This is the kind of thing that happens with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then we talked about it last week in Total Recall, where it's like, like he's playing an everyman character, but he's not an everyman. Like this, he doesn't work in like the movie jingle all the way, which I love, by the way, and we will definitely see at some point, but like he doesn't work in a lot of ways in there because he's this enormous six foot three or four bulky, enormous Austrian guy with a thick accent. Nobody buys that he's like a computer salesman from the DMV or, you know, or, you know, and jingle all the way, like just some, some, I think he literally runs like a carpet business in Minnesota. Like, give me a break, right? You know, like whatever. And it's that kind of thing where it's like, yeah, why didn't she hear him immediately be like, you know, it's like, Harry, like, that should have been.

Nic

It's like his most distinctive noise. Right. Yeah. So this is great. They're captured by Salim, and he basically brings him right to show him the warhead.

Steve

Right. Well, that's. Yeah.

Nic

To show them both.

Steve

Yeah. But in the meantime, though, Juno is part of the kidnapping. Right. So we've got the Tia Carrera. She's back. And, of course, she realizes quickly that Helen is telling the truth about, I can. That's, it's Harry. He's not part of this. He's just a computer salesman. And she's like, oh, so this is your wife, you know, kind of thing. And, and, you know, makes a little flirty motion or whatever and makes Helen pissed off. And then they both get tranquilized on the, on the plane ride over.

Nic

That's right.

Steve

And so they ended up, you know, where they don't know where they are, but they're, like, on an island. Salim mentions that, you know, they're on, like, an island because they've got these four warheads. And this is where Helen fully realizes that Harry actually is a spy because Salim he says he is being brought here to confirm to the world what we have, what is here, and that it is capable and that we have what we say we have and we can use it. If I'm wrong and he's not who I believe he is, I'll kill you both. So you better hope I'm right, because she's trying to convince him. No, no, no. He's just a computer salesman. He's like, if that's true, you're both dead, because this is why he's here. And that's when he goes, like, you know, these are Russian rockets or whatever. He does the whole thing.

Nic

Right.

Steve

And so, so this is what he's there for.

Nic

And, and first he shows it to him, though, but Arnie's being snarky with him. He's like, do you know what this is? Oh, it's an espresso machine. I mean, you know, and he goes.

Steve

Through- Snow cone maker.

Nic

Different things. Yeah. So Salim's like, basically, we're gonna let the entire world know that Crimson Jihad is now a nuclear power.

Steve

Right.

Nic

And he makes this crazy demand where I'm like, oh, dude, what a terrorist. He said, I want all military forces out of the Middle East. What a piece of shit. Everything's gone well with everything.

Steve

Look, he's threatening anyone in the world with nuclear annihilation, so that's bad. But this is another of those terrorists.

Nic

Freedom fighters, freedom fighters. Hey, man, the consequence should maybe not be so extreme, but I like what you're going for.

Steve

I mean, arguing that American involvement in the Middle East was too heavy-handed in the early 90s is like not a bad argument to make as it was, you know? Like, so, yeah, so that's interesting. But again, this is the 90s. This was the time, I think this is one of the first movies, or at least right around this time in movies in the mid 90s where we shifted from like every movie, because it was post Berlin Wall, we couldn't have the Soviets. They weren't around anymore. They couldn't be the bad guys in all these geopolitics. Political thrillers and movies where we had a global scale threat. Couldn't be the Soviets anymore because there were no Soviets. So movies like this and Air Force One and a bunch of others where it's essentially like Islamic Jihadists or something. It's always something like that.

Nic

Because the 93 World Trade Center thing would have been in place when this movie was written.

Steve

Exactly. And there's that. So I will say Iron Eagle was a bit ahead of the curve. I think that was 1986 and they were already Nameless Middle Eastern country was sort of the bad guys in that one. So they came at it early.

Nic

When Salim is, so he's making his video and he's getting on there and doing the, like, you know, so America needs to know, we will destroy one major city every day, you know, until this is done. And then the guy is kind of recording him and meekly, like, sticks his head out from the eyepiece of the camera's like, battery. Just again, like, so great. Like, this is what sets this movie apart from other action movies is it humanizes even the worst bad guys in a way by like this goofy human shit happening.

Steve

He's like, what do you mean? Get another battery. I think I have one in the truck. It's over here. Shh, just go. Like, he's just so done with it. But yeah, but they actually, so now they put Helen and Harry into this little, like, almost looks like a barn or some kind of like wood tool shed or something. It's a small little building on the thing. He says, We're on this uninhabited island. He doesn't say where they are, but we're on an uninhabited island. This is where we will detonate the first one to prove what we can do and to show that we can be humanitarian or something. We can be reasonable and not necessarily, like basically their test shot. They're gonna waste one of their warheads to just prove they have them.

Nic

Like the one in the rock that just went into the ocean.

Steve

Yeah, exactly. That kind of idea. Exactly. So there's that. So they take Helen and Harry because they want to basically get information out of Harry. And we meet Samir, I think is the name of the old guy who's like the torture dude, whatever.

Nic

This guy is a creepy looking guy.

Steve

Really creepy looking. Way too skinny.

Nic

Yeah.

Steve

Kind of, like, gross, whatever. And he. He gives a, like, a truth serum, a sodium pentathol, I think, or whatever, injection to Harry. And it's like, you know, I'll be back when this takes effect, you know, or whatever. And it starts affecting him almost right away. And Helen's like, what's going on? He goes, truth serum. So you have to sell the juice. Ask me something where I would normally lie. And she's like, are we gonna die? He goes, yup.

Nic

Like, yeah, let's get it.

Steve

They're gonna shoot us in the head or torture us to death or leave us here for the nuke to He's like, Harry, stop.

Nic

Yeah, the truth serum scene is really good. And in the meantime, Abu Aziz is going through-- Salim is going through his stuff and he finds the picture that includes their daughter.

Steve

That's right.

Nic

So he's like, All right, I got this.

Steve

And we find out Gib is on the way at some point here, in one of the cut, because the purse is still bugged. And so before Salim and his guys find the purse and the bug in it, Gib and they're already on the way to the island to try and find find these people. Yeah, they're in helicopters or whatever. And they find out that they are in the Florida Keys.

Nic

Yes.

Steve

They are one of the very, very distant islands of the Florida Keys. Because later, just a little bit later, Harry and Helen are looking, and Helen goes, why are, if we're on an island, why are they using trucks? And Harry goes, we must be in the keys because there's a highway that goes and connects them all. And it's little indicators that, like, they're kind of aware of things going on around them. But I love when, so Helen asks Harry, too, like, did you ever kill anybody? He goes, yeah, but they will all head. And then Samir comes back and is like, oh, it's ready to do this. And he goes, so, you know, are you ready to tell the truth? He goes, Yes, I'm going to kill you very soon. Oh, how would that happen? Exactly. And he kind of goes, I'm going to use you as a human shield, and I'm going to kill that guy with one of those weapons. And then I'm going to, I was thinking about breaking your neck. You know, whatever he says, I'm doing a terrible oral pressure now. But he's just like, you got a.

Nic

Little like drag partway through. I like that.

Steve

No, but he's basically like, oh, really? And he's like, well, how are you gonna do that? He's like, you know my handcuffs? He's like, I picked them. And then so he shows him and then another fight ensues so quick. It's so fast, but it's so good.

Nic

Oh man, I really love that. Yeah. And their whole escape and him just dispatching guys so quickly and efficiently.

Steve

Like John Wick style. Yeah.

Nic

And then Salim is talking to his crew because they're all celebratory because like, all right, we're in. Like we have armed the first boss.

Steve

Yeah, yeah.

Nic

So they're gonna know what we have. Like, this isn't going to destroy people, but, like, this is the power move we have to make. And the way you celebrate is you just keep firing a gun up in the air forever.

Steve

Yes.

Nic

Florida Keys. Not the worst place to do that.

Steve

Pretty anywhere in Florida.

Nic

Not the worst place to fire a gun in any direction. But, yeah, I always like the. The celebratory. Ooh, yeah. Fire in the air.

Steve

They do encase the bomb after it's armed. They put, like, cement on it, so it can't be. Dealt with at this point. It's gonna go off. They put an hour and a half timer and that's probably quickcrete or whatever. It's not gonna take long to harden. So that is going to go off whether they want it to or not. As Helen and Harry are trying to make their escape, Harry continues to beat guys up, shoot them, fight whatever. And at one point, Helen gives a great line where she kind of under her breath goes, I married Rambo, which is extra funny because that's Stallone and that's Schwarzenegger. And I love that sort of play on the idea that she's referencing a Stallone character.

Nic

Oh, yeah.

Steve

Right. It's funny.

Nic

Well, we get that again in, is it Last Action Hero?

Steve

Oh, yeah.

Nic

The joke is that, because in that world, I think Sylvester Stallone was the Terminator in that world.

Steve

In that world, Schwarzenegger isn't a movie star because he's that character, that cop or whatever. Yeah, very funny stuff.

Nic

And then in Demolition Man, Stallone is talking about the Schwarzenegger Presidential Library. So it is funny to see these guys talk about each other.

Steve

They knew who they were. You know what I mean? Those two for sure. Sure.

Nic

So, yeah, so Harry's, he's translating. They know what's going on here. He gives Helen a gun.

Steve

Gives her the Uzi, which seems like a bad call initially, in my opinion. She handed her a pistol, but yeah, gives her the Uzi.

Nic

And he's telling her to help him out. And this scene is incredible and super ingenious and everything. So she goes to shoot the Uzi, and the recoil takes her hand back. Back immediately. She's having trouble shooting it. It falls out of her hand. And then the Uzi, perfectly like a, like a deadly Slinky, is just tumbling down the stairs and blasting off little bursts of rounds exactly at all the, all the guys who are coming after them.

Steve

It kills, like, 10 dudes with this bouncing Uzi and is just like, I love it. It is inspired goofball. And it's great. Like, yeah, for sure.

Nic

I I just love the brainstorm of, like, what's a fun way to kill people. Right. And this is really one of the best I've seen.

Steve

And the neck, I think in the very next scene, as they're continuing to fight their way kind of out of this thing and deal with this is really great too, is that he's got a gasoline, he gets a gasoline dispenser hose and he's got a machine gun with him and he uses like the muzzle flash from the machine gun to light the gasoline and then uses it like a flamethrower.

Nic

Brilliant.

Steve

Love it.

Nic

Incredible. Gimme Arnie busting his way out of a compound in the other Absolutely. It really always works.

Steve

And then this particular sequence of battling kind of comes to an end as Salim grabs a missile launcher and shoots it at Harry, but it actually hits like a gas tank and a huge explosion occurs. But Harry, we see, is able to just dive into the water off the dock kind of ahead of the fireball. But to everybody on the other side of that tank, it looks like he's dead.

Nic

Oh, yeah.

Steve

For sure. And so Helen thinks he's dead. Salim thinks he's got him even going I was like, yes, or whatever, which is a super good.

Nic

Another, just one of those little things that kind of humanizes this guy that makes this movie like more fun than being dark.

Steve

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nic

And Harry's dive, just perfect Olympic form going off in there. No splash. Really nice.

Steve

Also clearly the stuntman again, very obviously.

Nic

It might have been Arnie wearing a rubber mask of the stunt man's face because he didn't want to.

Steve

Oh, that's definitely something to do for sure. Yeah, that's common.

Nic

Yeah, so Juno's got Helen. They're in the stretch limo going out. There's a couple of like rider trucks that both have warheads in there.

Steve

Right, so there's three warheads left. Two of them are on like packaged trucks, like box trucks, and one of them is on a helicopter that Salim gets on. So they fly off to wherever they're headed. We don't know, they don't say ahead of time. And the two like rental trucks, and then the limo that Juno and Helen are in follow and just start driving down that highway that connects all the keys. They're driving down that way. Because we know that time is ticking, right, and that things can go off. So Gib arrives with the crew, the helicopters, of course Harry's the only one left because everybody else is either dead or has left the the island on those trucks and stuff. So he walks out and is like telling him, like, we got to get out of here, all this stuff. They find out, like, that the blast radius or, like, the safe zone should be about 12 miles away. So make sure you get everybody, you know, Coast Guard, sheriffs, whoever, get everybody away from at least 12 miles around this island, you know, whatever, that kind of thing. And this is one of the best action sequences in the movie. At this point, we've got two Marine Corps Harrier Jets coming to play, and I gotta say, I loved Harrier Jets as a kid. I thought they were the coolest damn planes. They looked neat. They had those big turbines in the front. They could do the vertical takeoff and landing stuff. Like Harriers were frickin cool. And that is one of my favorite things about this movie is that they really feature these two Harrier Jets for the rest of the movie.

Nic

Yeah.

Steve

At this point, for the rest of the movie, the Harriers play an incredibly important part.

Nic

They're the main thing, right?

Steve

Exactly. So it's really good if you're a fan of the Harrier. Good stuff.

Nic

And I love that it's Harry and a Harry. I think that's nice.

Steve

Very nice.

Nic

Yeah, the Harrier jets are cool as shit, and they're pursuing these trucks going across the bridge, trying to blow up the bridge and stuff. The trucks are trying to shoot at them. At one point, from the back of one of the trucks, one of the terrorists picks up a missile launcher to shoot down the jet, but he just shoots it through the guy in the front seat, like Ricky O style, just through his chest.

Steve

Literally using the missile launcher backwards.

Nic

Oh my God.

Steve

Or no, I don't think it's that. I think the missile goes out the back of it, but it's like the exhaust or the propulsion from the missile launcher launches the dude out the car.

Nic

Okay.

Steve

I think the missile does go towards the rocket or go towards the plane. The plane's able to dodge it, but I think it's that propulsion exhaust or whatever that blows the dude back and out the front windshield. Bye bye. Super bad. And so, so yeah, so then the, they try with the guns and they don't really have a ton of success. I think they do maybe stop one of the vans that way, but the other one's still going. And so, Harry calls in, it's like, Marines, like, you know, usual maverick missiles go for the bridge. And one of the pilots goes, sir, just double checking, the missile explosions won't set the nukes off, right? And he goes, that is affirmative. And then he looks at Gibb and kind of shrugs, like, I don't know. Maybe, I don't know. Like, that is a risky thing, dude.

Nic

The urgency of this was kind of funny to me. Because it's like, yeah, so they get across the bridge. They're still just in Florida. We got hours before they get to anything we care about. So just wait until you-- It's true.

Steve

I mean, Miami's nice. They do end up targeting Miami.

Nic

That bridge, though, is so fun as a setting. And just like those crazy long bridges reminds me of the San Mateo Bridge. I do think about this movie when I go on that bridge, because that's one of the few very low, very long bridges that we have around here.

Steve

Absolutely, yeah.

Nic

Um, yeah. So we've got this one of the trucks kind of gets right up to the edge. They'd blown up the bridge in front of it. They're able to just stop and it's teetering over the edge. You can see the guy's kind of freaking out. And then they, the truck rocks back a little. So the guy in the front seat looks back relieved, like, oh, good, good, we're good.

Steve

Fine.

Nic

And then a seagull lands on the front. It's a big ass bird.

Steve

Okay.

Nic

Pelican lands on the front of the truck and tips it down. And of course it explodes on impact because why would it not?

Steve

Right. Of course, also not setting off the nuke. I mean, I guess there is some detonator you specifically have to do to light these nuclear weapons, but it does explode with a nuclear warhead on it. It's not good.

Nic

No, none of this is good. I mean, even this stuff where it's like, oh, we diverted. Yeah, we still get a lot of ongoing environmental remediation here after this. So the girls are fighting in the limo now.

Steve

Yes. So now Juno is about to shoot at, not at Helen. I think she's going to shoot out at the, at the, helicopter or something. I can't remember. But basically, Helen, like, grabs the gun or tries to. Juno ends up shooting her driver, and his foot basically just lands on the gas and just is. Is not moving. Right. So now the no one's in the control of the car, but. But it's speeding. It's just. It's getting faster and faster, going to all, you know, pedal to the metal, bouncing back and forth between the sides of the bridge as the two girls are inside. The two women are inside fighting. And I gotta be honest, Jamie Lee Curtis is whooping. Ass like she is doing a great job. Who trained this woman to fight? Right. The character. I mean, like, who trained Helen to ask her to fight? She can do it. She is whooping it.

Nic

She spent, she spent like 10 minutes on the exercise bike, but that was enough for her to, like, you know, get back in. But, yeah, she's awesome.

Steve

She's great. And she ends up kind of taking Juno out by smacking her twice hard with a full champagne bottle, which, which doesn't break. Well, that's not surprising. Champagne bottles are, are thick enough and strong enough to withstand six atmospheres of pressure inside.

Nic

Yeah, but in a movie, you're breaking. Glass when you hit somebody with glass.

Steve

That's fair. But I do not think she could have possibly survived those two strikes to the head with that bottle. Like, I thought for sure she was dead when she comes to a few minutes later. I'm like, no way. Like, there is no way. Yeah, she came to.

Nic

She was way too peppy when she came to.

Steve

Yeah, she should be, like, permanent brain damage at a minimum with that amount of. Of strike. There's a concussion protocol to go through here. This whole, like, rescue scene now becomes amazing because. Like she isn't, you know, so the driver's dead, she's incapacitated Juno, she goes up through the sunroof of the limo and Harry and Gib are in a helicopter trying to get to her basically. And it is an incredibly tense and awesome sequence of they all recognize that the bridge is out ahead right there racing towards where the Harriers destroyed the bridge and she will die if they can't get her out of there and they can't stop the car or slow it down. So they are like Harry is hanging off the skids of the helicopter trying to get her hand and, you know, only at the very last moment is she able to finally reach him and grab onto him so that he doesn't even pull her up. The limo.

Nic

So limo just separates. Yeah.

Steve

Descends below her into the water as she is continuing to, like, whatever. But it's a fantastic sequence. Very, very cool.

Nic

Yeah, I love that. That's a great stunt.

Steve

Yeah.

Nic

And, yeah, so they still have the bomb. I mean, they know that the bomb is going to go off in a couple minutes.

Steve

Yes.

Nic

So they land and everything, and Tom Arnold's going around telling everyone, like, All right, it's about to go off. Don't look at this.

Steve

Don't look at the blast. It'll blind you. Yeah, yeah.

Nic

And Arnie and Harry and Helen now are kissing, like, as this nuclear blast is going on behind them.

Steve

I mean, one of the coolest backdrops to a kiss possible is a nuclear explosion in a safe distance. That is cool. But yeah, but this is also the next indicator, right, where all of these things that they have gone through together They're good. Like Helen and Harry were having a rough patch. Yes, but they love each other and they are going to be rededicated to each other. There's this is the moment that like ends the subplot in a sense of the marriage of the Taskers. Do you know what I mean? Like that's cool. We're good with that. That part's done. Now Gib is like, Hey, we found him. We found Salim. He's in Miami. He's up on the roof of this building that's being worked on whatever in downtown. He's got the warhead with them. He's got a hostage. He's got Dana. They really gloss over how the hell they got her. They live in suburban DC. We're now in Miami. He only saw that picture maybe the night before. So who is grabbing her and getting her to Miami in time for all this? It's a little suspect, in my opinion, but we need an additional, what I don't need. It's good to have an additional sort of urgency to all this because it's upon hearing that, that gets Harry himself to get into one of the Harrier jets and start flying it. They make a big deal about, Gibb's like, you know, it's been 10 years since you've flown one of these things, man. Don't pretend you can keep doing this, whatever. And I love when he's talking, the pilots are like, Hey, somebody's got a sign for this aircraft. You can't just take it. He goes, oh, yeah, yeah, I'll sign that. And Tom's like, It's cool, he's got like 100 hours in the simulator. He's a little rusty right now, but he's gonna pick, you know, it's like riding a bike, it's fine. He's gonna be right back on it. He's like crushing police cars and stuff.

Nic

I'm trying to take it off. Take off in that plane is so funny.

Steve

And again, sorry. Excuse me, sorry.

Nic

What a gent. I really like the commandeering of vehicles in this movie. This is like one of my favorite commandeering films. Because we've commandeered an animal, a motorcycle, and now a jet.

Steve

Yeah, and Salim commandeering that motorcycle, ripping that guy off of it while it's in motion is pretty bad.

Nic

He did that without the mic. Yeah, the The bike didn't even have to stop. It was like one fluid motion.

Steve

Yeah.

Nic

So Salim and the crew, they're on the 20th floor of the building and it's on the news and everything and they know it and he's got a helicopter up there and stuff.

Steve

And they're firing weapons from the roof but not at anyone.

Nic

Just stay away from us.

Steve

Exactly that kind of thing. And sure enough they have Dana. Dana, Harry and Helen's daughter is there being held, whatever. And there's this moment where Salim goes and puts the sort of key that he wears around his neck for the arming device, he puts it in, but at that time they're told that the news crew that they asked for has arrived, so like don't shoot, the news crew's coming up, which of course includes Harry and Gibbs' buddy from the agency, the one with the camera, which we see pretty quickly. But as Salim is like talking to the news crew and like being filmed, it goes like, you know, we, the Crimson Jihad, with one turn of that key, And the new the reporter who's an idiot turns and goes what key that key and he turns and goes who took the key?

Nic

Yeah, and Dana thinking smart again not in her mind the daughter of a secret agent.

Steve

No, right?

Nic

Like the daughter of the most boring parents in the world, but she has these instincts man.

Steve

It's in her blood and I don't yeah, I don't know why she would but it's ballsy and it's and she takes it and she runs out and is being and they literally just like kill her like shoot her Like, they don't care about the hostage part anymore. He needs that key back. But she gets up onto the roof and then out onto a crane. And this is kind of what saves her from being shot, is that now if he were to shoot her, her body and the key would fall to the ground below. He'd never get that key back. Right, right. So now he can't shoot at her. And there's no way she would have known that. I think she was just trying to get away. Yeah, yeah. But then she does think eventually and threatens and says, if you shoot me, this will fall. But it's initially I think Salim realizes that before Dana says it to him. So it's almost like Dana realized it after the fact, but it's still like good. That's this position she's in. And this is when dad Harry arrives in the Harrier and they again, we start sort of like the reverse of the limo thing where we're trying to get Dana to like drop down onto the chair from above, but it's like it's terrifying and he can't really get close enough. And again, we're in this sort of, you know, Stalone at the beginning of Cliffhanger. Are you going to be able to hold on or not? You know, there's all this going on. Whether it's the crane or the Harrier or anything. And it's just a lot of like, somebody could slip. Like, somebody could slip is like a huge part of this movie.

Nic

Oh my God. Yeah, it totally is. And his precision piloting this thing.

Steve

Oh yeah.

Nic

I mean, it just seems, yeah, it's very intense. And we were just taken from like one of the best action sequences ever where the movie could have like wrapped up and everyone could be satisfied at that point. And now this is so over the top. One thing I love in the Harrier is, Where he basically uses it to blast out the entire floor with the guns. Those are the most damaging guns I've ever seen. Yeah, I don't know what-- It just disintegrated. It was almost like you could take the entire floor out, like if you took a whole level of Jenga out, like, really fast at once, and the building would just drop into place on top of it.

Steve

Yeah, well, I mean, to be fair, it was all the glass, right? He was destroying the windows and killing the people, but probably not, you know, this isn't jet fuel. The steel beams are fine.

Nic

Yeah.

Steve

So, yeah.

Nic

Yeah. So in the camera crew now, his. His guy has basically taken his gun. Awesome. Good, like, resolution for this character because he's kind of like the wimpy whatever.

Steve

Guy, like, yeah, the nerd guy.

Nic

And then it turns out, oh, no, this guy is a stone cold killer.

Steve

He's still in Omega sector, which we have to assume is, like, CIA plus. He knows how to use a weapon, and sure enough, he's got. He got it like secreted in the video camera, right? And he pulls it out and just boom, boom, boom again, dead eye, just three bullets, three dead guys, you know?

Nic

Yeah. Really cool. Okay, so the crane is happening here. So we got some tension between the crane and we're hanging and the Harrier's there. And Salim's basically, he's climbing out towards Dana. And Dana's finally like looks like she's lowering herself down.

Steve

She does finally kind of drop onto it.

Nic

Yeah.

Steve

And it's kind of hanging on to the front front of the cockpit, essentially. Right. And that's when Salim is like, well, I'm not just gonna let him just fly away. So he kind of jumps onto the plane. He's kind of hanging out on the back of the plane, trying to get to the cockpit. At one point, Harry looks at Dana and kind of signals, you know, to, like, his right or whatever, and they try to, like, you know, make it so that the whole thing Falls. Yeah. He slips off, but he gets caught. He gets caught on a missile. Yes. On, like, his backpack or something. Right. And that's when. So then, you know, Harry gets to We have maybe the last one-liner of the movie. Not the last, but one of the better ones. You're fired.

Nic

Fires the missile, which goes through the missing floor of the building, right into the other bad guys in the helicopter. So taking out the remaining Crimson Jihad members anymore.

Steve

That's right. The entire faction is now done. And he's able to land with Dana and get her safely to the ground. The Taskers are good. They're okay.

Nic

Yeah, yeah, they're good. And now, you know, I think we're kind of flashing forward a bit because it doesn't give a whole lot of like, you know, bad guys going off in handcuffs because there's nothing.

Steve

They're all dead. Oh, yeah. All the bad guys are dead.

Nic

Snow shovel at this point. Yeah. So it kind of cuts forward and they're at a very similar ball to the one they were at in the beginning.

Steve

Initially, it's one year later and it's the Tasker home and they're like doing a thumb war. He's playing thumb wars with Dana and whatever. But then there's a phone call, and Helen gets up, and it's. It's the modulated voice. I'm like, and it's like, Boris and Doris, like, it's time for another mission or whatever. And so now they're working together. And then, yes, they're. They end up at, like, a party very much like the opening sequence at Lake Chapo. And. But Helen is, like, fully on board. She is fully involved. She's part of this system now. And. And so they are doing the same kind of stuff with, like, you know, oh, Colonel, nice to see you, like, the whole. People hiding in plain sight, and then they decide to tango. And I love that Tom Arnold is like, I'm tired of being in the van. I've been in the van for 15 years. You guys are doing van next time. I'm tired of this. This is dumb. Get out of there.

Nic

And they run into at the party, because I think Harry is pretending to be a waiter.

Steve

No, no, no, no, no, no. They're guests. They're guests. But they run into Simon.

Nic

Simon is there, and he's talking. And he's doing. And how did he end up there?

Steve

Well, I think he's actually a cater waiter. Oh, right. He's actually a cater waiter, but he's pretending to some gorgeous woman in an evening gown that he's only there pretending to be a cater waiter so that he, because he's actually a secret agent and, like, whatever. And that's when, you know, Harry and Helen kind of, you know, and she puts, she's, we can't really see it, but she's got, like, lipstick that she puts up against his chin as if it's the butt of a gun, you know? And so, and he just pisses himself again.

Nic

He pisses himself twice. That's A lot of self-pissing for no alcohol being consumed. Yep.

Steve

And then they tango the night away, I guess. Regardless of the mission, they just decide to tango. Again, Jamie Lee Curtis looks great in that dress. The tango is sexy. That's all that. And I do love that Tom Arnold is keeping talking. Gibb continues to talk to them in their ears and he's like, Don't ignore me, Harry. That's rude. I just love that stuff.

Nic

Yeah, and the way that it just kind of goes to the credits. So he's saying, Hey, you don't have time to tango. You got a mission. And they're ignoring him and it's kind of zoom panning out as the credits are rolling. Great way to end this movie.

Steve

Yeah, that's true lies. That is the whole thing.

Nic

Oh, my God.

Steve

Okay, man. Well, I, this was my pick. I'll go ahead and, and kind of give my rating first. I watched this movie over the course of the day yesterday. I did have to kind of pause in the middle and take care of some stuff. So it sort of, mostly you do a little bit and you come back to the rest of it. And it didn't matter. I picked right up where I left off with a huge shit-eating grin on my face the whole time. This is one of those movies that watching it just makes me smile. It is so much fun. It is such a good action movie, but it is also such a funny movie. Tom Arnold, I'm not usually a big fan, and it's probably not fair to him. I associate him with Roseanne Barr too much, and that's, I think, part of the reason why I don't like him, is that sort of birds of a feather thing. So maybe not fair to Tom Arnold. This is a fantastic casting decision. This is a fantastic role for him. He is perfect for this because he's just, he's just kind of masculine enough that you buy that he's in this agency to begin with, but he's also, like, appropriately a little soft bodied and kind of, you know what I mean? And kind of nerdy. And the fact that you can imagine that this Thrice divorced guy gets through life by being funny, like, yeah, I buy that. I completely buy that. You know, Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis are both amazing in this. Again, I, you know, this is exactly the kind of role that Schwarzenegger should play. It's always funny when he is, like, given this role where it's like, you know. Yeah, he's, he's, it doesn't work that he's a normal guy. Yeah, but it's, but that's how the charm of Arnie kind of works. Yeah. I, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. You know, I hadn't seen it in a long time, and there was nothing about it that made me go, oh, that doesn't hold up or, oh, that doesn't work or anything like that. I'm a five out of five. I've been handing out fives like candy. These candy lately, but I am a five out of five on True Lies. I think this movie is wonderful. I enjoyed every minute of it. And it's a longer one. We're at two hours 21, I think, is this one. So it's a longer movie, but it didn't really feel like it. It's a fantastic film, and I'm five out of five.

Nic

All right. Well, yeah, I mean, I think all those points are great. One thing I, I did want to bring up is Arnie was almost never paired with somebody like Tom Arnold before or. After this, like a comic relief buddy to be like his sidekick. Well, twins in a movie. Yeah, but that's not an action. It's not like a same kind of movie.

Steve

No, that's true.

Nic

But it works so well. Like, if he had done a series of, like, 48 Hours type movies, I think would have done excellent for him. Yeah, but this is some of the best acting that Schwarzenegger does. Yeah. Just in terms of, like, he knows what he needs to do. Like, he's very effective comedically. He's good at pretending. At being super slick. He's good at being a dork. Yeah, he really, like, does it. Jamie Lee Curtis. Incredible. The. The bad guys, the villains and stuff, like, it's hard to pick anything apart. And my only beef would be like, yeah, it's a little long, but again, what am I removing from this movie?

Steve

Except for Jamie Lee Curtis's clothes.

Nic

But, yeah, dude, I mean, if we're rating Arnie, this is the best Gateway. Arnie film. This is a movie that might get you to enjoy other Arnie films. Like, we have one more left in January, which might be so user friendly. This is a good way to get into, like, the general type of that he does.

Steve

Yeah. Yeah.

Nic

Surrounded by a bunch of stuff that's acceptable to everybody. I'm gonna go five on this one as well. This movie's awesome. James Cameron is prime. Arnie in his prime. Hard to beat. Really fun. Watch it if you. I haven't.

Steve

Yeah.

Nic

And, yeah, love it.

Steve

Love it. 10 out of 10. It's, I think, maybe our fourth 10 out of 10 movie. Yeah. The Fugitive, the Silence of the Lambs. I'm not even sure if we did any others, but, yeah, not very many. But this is, like, one of the few five out of fives from us or 10 out of tens total altogether. Oh, the thing was a 10 out of 10. That's right. But that's it. This is only the fourth one out of 45 movies. So that's fairly rare praise from us for True Lies. Okay, man, we do have one more week in January.

Nic

We do.

Steve

You've got another pick. What are we gonna wrap up this Arnold Schwarzenegger film fest with?

Nic

Okay, well, we'll see how this one goes, because this is my personal favorite Schwarzenegger movie. Okay? And I don't know if I'll even give it a five, because I'm trying to rate, you know, in terms of what other people might want to see, but this is the one that gives me, like, the most of his essence. It has the most arniness to it. The most, like, weird bullshit, crazy action. We're gonna go to 1985. We're gonna go to, I don't know, some fucking unknown island run by a bad guy who gives a shit. It doesn't matter. He's gonna be buff as hell. He's gonna have all kinds of cool weapons. He's gonna have to rescue his daughter Alyssa Milano. And we're gonna visit 1985's Commando.

Steve

Nice Commando. I gotta be honest with you. I'm not sure I've ever seen Commando start to finish in one sitting. I know I've seen lots of stuff from it over the years, but I don't think I've ever sat down and watched Commando beginning to end. So I'm very excited. Excited about that. You know, it's so funny, so many of these action movies where it's like, you know, the sort of, like, gorgeous younger actresses playing the daughters of people that, like, we ended up kind of knowing, you know, through more adult roles later in careers. But, like, you know, we had, obviously, Eliza dushku and true lies here. Alyssa Milano next week in Commando. We had Dominique Swain and Face Off. Like, it's so funny to look back at some of these and think about the age we were at the time.

Nic

Totally.

Steve

Alyssa Milano is a little older than us, but, like, you know, again, this is 85, so super excited for that. Cannot to watch Commando and talk to you about Commando next week, man. That's gonna be great.

Nic

All right, cool.

Steve

That's a wrap. So if you like what you hear and we hope you do, please consider heading over to Apple or Spotify and leaving us a five-star review. It really helps new folks find the show. Be sure to check out our website at 2dads1movie.com. that's the number two and the number one. There you can contact us directly, find out all kinds of info about our episodes and the films we discuss, search through transcripts of the show, and much more. We'd also love it if you followed us Instagram at two dads one movie. Once again, this has been true lies, another episode of two dads one movie.

Nic

I'm Steve and I'm Nic.

Steve

Thank you so much for listening and we'll catch you next week.

Nic

Thanks everyone.