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?
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 Followo and Nick Briana.
Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Two Dads, One Movie. I'm Steve. And I'm
Nick. 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, Nick, 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. 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?
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. 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. Absolutely. It's more of like a PG-15.
Yeah, I could see that. Yeah. 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. 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. 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. 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. I mean, it kind of seems to be IMDb's wheelhouse for
the most part. 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. Oh, for sure. Yeah. To look at it any other way. So those
are the facts. On true lies. One thing
about Cameron and the budgets real quick. Yeah, yeah. I remember hearing an interview with
him. I think it was when the second Avatar came out and they were talking.
About like, how do you how do. 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.
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.
It's really just, I always like that. It's like routing money from the studio
to actual people of talent, right? That's exactly it, right. 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. It's a funny kind of typecasting based on the job. Of course, the cook
is French, and the guard is German. 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. Underwater plus fire explosion is
always gonna work for me. Absolutely. 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. 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. 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. 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? 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.
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? 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. I don't think it's
legal for them to own a suit. No, you have to pin all the medals.
That's right. 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. 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. He creates a connection, basically. Right. On the floor, they're not supposed to
be. Yes. 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. Right. And I love that so
much. Like, that's just one of those things that just really pushes this movie.
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. To do it in a way that's different. 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. Just to
let us know. Oh, no, this guy is good. This guy's believable. 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. Because they discovered the ice had been broken. 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.
Okay, good. 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. Showdown in Little Tokyo, great Dolph Lundgren, Brandon Lee vehicle.
Yeah, she's great in that. This is, yeah, the hold this woman had
on me in the 90s is remarkable. Yeah. 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.
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. Exactly. 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. 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. And he smashes the dog's head. He goes,
Stay. Stay. 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. So it took the 90s to
get them Blue Jeans, MTV, and Dobermans, right? They had to wait for
the Rottweiler to come later. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Got it. Got it. Yeah,
they got Trans Am's in 1998. Yeah. 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. 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. Yeah, I know. What's the one nobody likes? A view
to a kill. There's one nobody likes that Christopher Walken was the bad guy.
That's right, and that was Roger Moore, I think, right? Yes, it was the Roger
Moore returning for that one. The old Roger Moore one, yeah, he was
too old for it. 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. 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. Yeah.
And it. Yeah, it doesn't slow play his skill set. No, the film at all.
It's quite clear this is Superman. Yeah. 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. 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. 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. 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. That's right.
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. Oh, my God. What a nightmare, right? 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? 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. 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. Sorry. So Gibb's jokes work like- There you
go. Yeah, I got you. Yeah. 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. 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... 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. 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, Nick Fury, dude, like with the scars
and the eyepatch and everything. And obviously Nick 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 Nick Fury
thing. But the original Nick 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 Nick Fury with Charlton Heston's character design.
I love the eyepatch as a visual.
Who are some of your favorite eyepatch guys? Snake Plissken.
Yeah. He's probably my favorite. And actually sticking with Kurt Russell, Captain Ron as
well, actually. 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. 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. But eyepatch always works. And it's
like a small, like 90s fashion style eyepatch. Very tiny.
You know, I was like, dude, you can get more coverage than that. It almost
looks like the eyepatch version of Joe Pesci's glasses in Moonraker or Moonwalker.
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. That's right. So my wife.
Yeah. So that's, that's where we're at with their. 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.
Art and collectibles are so ripe generally for
money laundering, tax fraud, all that stuff. So it's the perfect Because
how much. 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. 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.
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. Yeah, they're way there. Their faces are way too in focus
at this point for them to not become important. We can tell that they're in
the plot. These characters are in the plot. Yeah. 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.
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. 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. Oh, yeah. 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. 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. But yeah, he is being
followed now, and we are really in for a treat here.
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. 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. Older guy, yeah. 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. Yeah,
cool off. But while this fight's been happening. No, go ahead.
Oh, no, I just want to say that this scene here,
the toilet's breaking. Yeah. 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. Nice. As a fully
aficianado, I really, really so that explains to me why it was up for
all these awards. 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. Right. 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. 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. 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. Yes. Right. And has to like, and is shocked himself that he doesn't
get hit by anything. 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. Tommy Arnold. Big relief.
So Salim has now yoinked a guy
off his motorcycle. Brutally, but really, really impressive. Yeah, really clotheslines
a guy. 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. 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. For sure. 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. 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.
Yeah, exactly. He's still a gentleman spy when it comes down to it. Exactly.
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. Excuses me. Oh my God. It's the lobby of the Marriott
Hotel. It's a big high rise Marriott. Okay. 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. And then the horse's tail
whips his wife in the face right after that. Oh my God.
So yeah. 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. Yeah. Which, which his knowledge of physics is incredible.
His calculations on the fly are really off the charts. 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. 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. 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. 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? It's a good one.
Oh, man. 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. That's right. So, of course, he comes home super
late, too late for his own party. Yeah. And they're, they're pissed. 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. I mean, it's his birthday,
not hers. True. It's not quite as bad, but I. 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. 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.
He literally says to me, Good thinking. Just over it. Nice work.
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. More than once?
He's blaming it on the eyepatch. 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. Kind of a sick name.
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. 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. Absolutely. Bill Paxton is. He must have been just the most
likable guy in real life to be able to be such a. 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. Yeah, so this character of Simon,
I mean, so they're kind of watching her
conversation. She's in this Chinese restaurant. Yeah, that's right.
Him. Yeah. And they're listening in. Do they plant something on her? 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.
Advice to listeners, keep your lies brief. 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. That's right. And then they also like put
a bug in her purse. That's right, okay, that's what it is. And they end
up back meeting again. That's right. 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. 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.
Give obviously likes this guy, because there's
part of Gib in this. Simon is probably more like Gib than he is like
Harry. 100%. 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. Rolling him so hard. Really good. 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. No, not at all. Not at all.
So he's gonna
go confront Simon or gonna go see him in person. Exactly. And we
get some great lines here. 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. 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. Yeah,
right. 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. With like a hot dog in
his mouth. He's like eating a hot dog or whatever. 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. Me lay it on you. 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.
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. 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. 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.
But yeah, that's probably the gnarliest violence in the whole movie. Honestly, it's a brutal
hit. It does like, you know, one hard backhand fist to the face that just
takes them out. 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. Yeah. Which is a frickin trailer.
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. A little bit. He's like, here, let me help
you. And, like, shoves her. It's like, oh, this guy is so creepy.
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. 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. Exactly. You know, really nice. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Exactly. Otherwise it's just a mirror. Regardless. Irregardless. It's all the same. Yeah.
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. Right, right. And it's totally fucked up. And he really just
needs to talk to his wife. The whole thing is terrifying, bad. 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're in trouble, but you can get out of trouble by
helping us, essentially, right? 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. 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. And Simon, in the meantime,
we have him. And they have him, like, you know, over a dam. Yeah.
Like the edge of a dam. Dangling him over there, you know, to. Make that
Richard Kimble jump. Yeah. And he folds
immediately. Oh, dude's a complete. 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. 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. 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. 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. It's like, it's shit.
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.
Helen's idea of what she wore as a bridesmaid to
her sister's wedding. Exactly. 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.
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. I think
the dress was probably constructed. 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. Oh, yeah. Right. She definitely is, is understanding the assignment,
in that sense, definitely. 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. 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.
Yeah. 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. 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. 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. Too manual.
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. The awkwardness of her dancing
might suggest no music. Yeah, and-- Right. '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. 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. 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. 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. He's kind of doing
the face off thing. 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.
Yeah. Such a smart way to. To keep this going here. And one thing
is when she hits him with the phone. Yeah. 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. 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?
Extract your accent. 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. 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. Right. Well,
that's. Yeah. To show them both. 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. That's right.
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. Right.
And so, so this is what he's there for. 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.
Through- Snow cone maker. Different things. Yeah. So Salim's like,
basically, we're gonna let the entire world know that Crimson Jihad is now
a nuclear power. Right. 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.
Look, he's threatening anyone in the world with nuclear annihilation,
so that's bad. But this is another of those terrorists. Freedom fighters,
freedom fighters. Hey, man, the consequence should maybe not be so extreme,
but I like what you're going for. 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.
Because the 93 World Trade Center thing
would have been in place when this movie was written.
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.
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. 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. Like the
one in the rock that just went into the ocean. 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. This guy is a creepy looking guy. Really creepy looking. Way too skinny.
Yeah. 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. Like,
yeah, let's get it. 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.
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. That's right. So he's
like, All right, I got this. 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. Yes. 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. Little like drag partway through.
I like that. 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. Oh man, I really
love that. Yeah. And their whole escape and him just
dispatching guys so quickly and efficiently. Like John Wick style. Yeah.
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. Yeah,
yeah. 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. Yes.
Florida Keys. Not the worst place to do that. Pretty anywhere
in Florida. 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.
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. Oh, yeah.
Right. It's funny. Well, we get that again in, is it Last
Action Hero? Oh, yeah. The joke is that, because in that
world, I think Sylvester Stallone was the Terminator in
that world. In that world, Schwarzenegger isn't a movie star because he's that character,
that cop or whatever. Yeah, very funny stuff. 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. They knew who they were. You know what I mean? Those two
for sure. Sure. So, yeah, so Harry's, he's translating.
They know what's going on here. He gives Helen a gun.
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. 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.
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.
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. 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. Brilliant. Love it. Incredible.
Gimme Arnie busting his way out of a compound in the other Absolutely.
It really always works. 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. Oh, yeah. 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. Another, just one of those little things
that kind of humanizes this guy that makes this movie like more fun than being
dark. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Harry's dive, just perfect Olympic form going off
in there. No splash. Really nice. Also clearly the stuntman
again, very obviously. It might have been Arnie wearing a rubber
mask of the stunt man's face because he didn't want to. Oh, that's definitely something
to do for sure. Yeah, that's common. 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. 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. Yeah. At this point,
for the rest of the movie, the Harriers play an incredibly important part. They're the
main thing, right? Exactly. So it's really good if you're a fan of the Harrier.
Good stuff. And I love that it's Harry and a Harry.
I think that's nice. Very nice. 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.
Literally using the missile launcher backwards. Oh my God. 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. Okay. 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. 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. I mean,
Miami's nice. They do end up targeting Miami. 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. Absolutely, yeah. 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. Fine. And then a seagull
lands on the front. It's a big ass bird. Okay. Pelican lands on the front
of the truck and tips it down. And of course it explodes on impact because
why would it not? 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. Yeah, but in a movie, you're breaking. Glass when
you hit somebody with glass. 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.
She was way too peppy when she came to. 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.
So limo just separates. Yeah. Descends below her into the water
as she is continuing to, like, whatever. But it's a fantastic sequence. Very,
very cool. Yeah, I love that. That's a great stunt. Yeah.
And, yeah, so they still have the bomb. I mean, they know that the
bomb is going to go off in a couple minutes. Yes. 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. Don't look at the blast. It'll blind you. Yeah,
yeah. And Arnie and Harry and Helen now are
kissing, like, as this nuclear blast is going on behind them. 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. I'm trying to take it off. Take off in that plane
is so funny. And again, sorry. Excuse me, sorry. 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. Yeah, and Salim commandeering
that motorcycle, ripping that guy off of it while it's in motion is pretty bad.
He did that without the mic. Yeah, the The bike didn't even have to stop.
It was like one fluid motion. Yeah.
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. And they're firing weapons from
the roof but not at anyone. Just stay away from us. 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?
Yeah, and Dana thinking smart again not in her
mind the daughter of a secret agent. No, right? Like the daughter of the most
boring parents in the world, but she has these instincts man. 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. Oh my God. Yeah, it totally is. And his precision piloting
this thing. Oh yeah. 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. 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. Yeah. So, yeah.
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.
Guy, like, yeah, the nerd guy. And then it turns out, oh, no, this guy
is a stone cold killer. 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? 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. She does finally kind of drop onto
it. Yeah. 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. 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. 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. 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. They're all dead. Oh, yeah. All the bad
guys are dead. 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. 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.
And they run into at the party, because I think
Harry is pretending to be a waiter. No, no, no, no,
no, no. They're guests. They're guests. But they run into Simon. Simon is there,
and he's talking. And he's doing. And how did he end up there? 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. He pisses himself twice.
That's A lot of self-pissing for no alcohol being
consumed. Yep. 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. 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. Yeah, that's true lies.
That is the whole thing. Oh, my God.
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. 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. No, that's true. 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?
Except for Jamie Lee Curtis's clothes.
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. Yeah. Yeah. 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.
Yeah. And, yeah, love it. 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.
We do. You've got another pick. What are we gonna wrap up this Arnold Schwarzenegger
film fest with? 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.
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. Totally. 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. All right,
cool. That's a wrap. So if you like what you hear and we hope you
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movie. Once again, this has been true lies, another episode of two dads one movie.
I'm Steve and I'm Nick. Thank you so much for listening and we'll catch you
next week. Thanks everyone.