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True Lies
Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras: :
Final Score:
Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras: :
Final Score:
I can’t believe it! It’s been 20 years since we’ve had a really decent version of True Lies on home video. The old DVD was painful to watch due to being Non-Anamorphic, and next to no one has a working D-VHS player to watch the old 1080i tape on anymore. I’ve had to make due with rip of the D-VHS tape made almost 10 years ago and put on my server and streamed, but pretty much every single Blu-ray fan has been BEGGING 20th Century Fox and James Cameron to re-release this film and The Abyss on Blu-ray or 4K UHD. It’s finally here and Disney/Fox have releases this, The Abyss, Aliens and the collector’s edition of both Avatar and Avatar 2 on streaming in preparation for the March release of these films on 4K UHD.
True Lies is probably one of the greatest 1990s action movies of all time, rivaling the all time greatest, which is of course Face/Off. This was a time when action stars were burly hulking men, the women were smoking hot, they all said horrible one liners, and things blew up EVERYWHERE. Arnold was still king of the action world at this time, and pretty much at his peak popularity when James Cameron created the cinematic masterpiece known as True Lies.
The story itself is pretty simple and rote, with your typical 90s trappings. Arnie is Harry Tasker, a mild mannered computer salesman with a big secret. He’s been married for almost 17 years to his wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis) and has a 14 year old daughter named Dana (Eliza Dushku). They live the suburban dream, but things aren’t exactly what they seem. Harry is actually a government spook, pulling off covert Mission Impossible style operations all over the globe, while coming home to wife and daughter under the guise of his computer salesman job. Things go haywire when a terrorist group known as Crimson Jihad start operating in the area and get their hands on some nuclear weapons. Harry and his partner Gib (Tom Arnold) are tasked with figuring things out, but they’re only able to get so much information before the terrorists figure out that Harry isn’t who he says he is.
Yeah, I don’t care what people say, True Lies is a stone cold action masterpiece. It has everything that we loved about the 90s and more. Cameron used an insane budget with some amazing special effects to pump up a fairly straightforward spy movie into a mega blockbuster with Arnold, Jamie Lee and everyone involved blowing things up left and right. It’s goofy, it’s silly, but it’s a whole lot of fun where we all just have to ignore the implausibility of it all (and mentally block out the fact that we can see every stunt double in the film plain as day, even worse than Face/Off) while stuffing popcorn down our face. This is THE quintessential action movie when someone asks me for a 90s action film, and I’m absolutely giddy that we finally get a home video release after all these years.
Rating:
Rated R for a lot of action/violence and some language
Video:
According to Bill Hunt Fox/Disney struck new masters for these films, but I’m not sure if that’s completely true as this looks remarkably like an older scan of the film with some of the same problems the DVHS tape had back 2003. But this time it’s just simply SLATHERED in AI tinkering that makes things look like a wax museum. You see, this is a bit different than the old fashioned DNR and smoothing techniques of 15 years ago, this time AI is used ala Titanic and The Lord of the Rings 4K to predict and smooth out grain, while also digitally creating new details at the same time. The idea is brilliant, and one day may be THE way to salvage old and dying films, but in this instance it’s over used and turned up to level 11.
The biggest problem from the transfer is that everything is basically a wax museum. Facial details are wiped out with what looks like putty for facial tones and textures. Check out the scene in the van near the beginning where Tom Arnold is giving instructions to Arnold. Or where Arnie slams Tom up against the car when he finds out his wife is most likely having an affair. Look at their faces and look at the facial hair on their face. They look like a live action version of Clay Face from the 1990s Batman The Animated Series. Even the facial hair stubble looks smeared and clay like, as if the AI struggled to replicate the stubble and just Photoshopped it in. Not to mention an incredibly thick and heavy teal color grading to the entire thing that doesn’t really help at all. The teal combined with the putty like faces makes them look even more gray and like LITERAL gray putty/clay. What’s even more eerie is watching the eyes on peoples faces. Due to the sharp contrast against the softer faces, the AI boosts the whites of the eyes and appears to make them razor sharp in contrast with the putty like tones of the faces, making it look like something straight out of a horror movie. Grain is nearly completely gone, but it’s not really “scrubbed” like we’re used to. You can actually see the grain if you look really closely, but it’s underneath an entire mountain of AI artifacting that is meant to cover it up, so it looks extremely odd.
Now, not everything is doom and gloom. The image looks way better than the old DVD in many ways, with some things like the red of a pipe, or the gleam of the yellow scaffolding that Dana and Aziz are teetering on near the end really shine. There’s a goodly amount of detail, but that detail gets hampered quite heavily by the tinkering. There are shots that look extremely well done, but those are almost instantly replaced by a horribly waxy looking shot, forcing you to watch good scene, bad scene over and over again throughout the movie. I have a hard time actually deciding which one is worse. Terminator 2 or this one, as they each do things better than the other. I can sort of forgive T2 due to how soft it looks and the over sharpening makes it look a bit garrish but not HORRIBLE, while this one screams “I could have been amazing, but James Cameron was addicted to working with AI technology instead of properly remastering me”. At this point I firmly believe Cameron needs to stay the heck away from his films when they’re remastered.
Audio:
Extras:
• Fear Is Not an Option: A Look Inside True Lies
Final Score:
True Lies is worth every second of the kinetic action ride. It’s full of great characters, a fun cast, and it just WORKED back in the 1990s. The only downside to this whole thing is a transfer that is better than we’ve had it for many years, but so incredibly butchered with James Cameron’s obsession with AI restoration technology. It honestly feels like he used this film (and a couple of the others from this batch sadly) as a testing hotbed for the tech more than actually be careful to replicate the source material. It is what is, and while I know that this is still a streaming copy vs. the full bitrate of a 4K UHD physical disc, but this is the let down of the decade. Which is compounded by the fact that fans have been waiting SOOOOOO long for this film to come out.
Technical Specifications:
Starring: Arnold Schwarzeneggar, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, Eliza Dushku, Bill Paxton, Art Malik, Tia Carrere
Directed by: James Cameron
Written by: James Cameron, Claude Zidi, Simon Michael
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1
Audio: English: Dolby Atmos
Subtitles: English
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Rated: R
Runtime: 140 Minutes
Digital Release Date: November 12th, 2023
Recommendation: AMAZING Movie
