True Lies

The director's 1994 film about a spy posing as a mild-mannered married man is cheapened with a junky small-screen transfer.

The difficulty with taking a $100m-budgeted action flick (True Lies was in fact the first movie ever to cost that much) and remaking it on a fraction of the cost is that we’re automatically forced into comparing and contrasting, the cheaper one inevitably not faring quite as well within a flashy genre such as this (one of the many reasons ABC’s Marvel shows were hard to stomach). (One could argue the film also led to Date Night, Knight and Day and a flurry of other genre-mixing crowd-pleasers.) At one point Cameron was set to take a larger role before retreating into the blue and handing over the baton to a team that promptly drops it, falls over and lands flat on their faces. Granted, it might only be the lightest of grazes with just a token executive producer credit but the finished product is so thoroughly junky that even the mildest of associations is the kind of embarrassment one would want scrubbed from both IMDb page and televisual history at large.

James Cameron's blockbuster 'True Lies' hits CBS with Steve Howey stepping in for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ginger Gonzaga for Jamie Lee Curtis.

CBS’ True Lies is much more in the vein of the network’s semi-recent reboots of things like Magnum, P.I. People talk about his expertise and excellence — it’s part of why he was “allowed” to have a civilian wife in the first place — but very little of it is on display in either the initial Helen-free mission or subsequent episodes. The use of foreign settings — so many Getty Images-style establishing shots of places like “Paris” and “Salzburg” — is meek. The team of directors, starting with Anthony Hemingway in the pilot, fail to mount anything memorable by way of a set piece, with a milquetoast helicopter stunt in the premiere rather amusingly standing is as a shadow of the Harrier-driven spectacle in the movie. I’m rooting for more screen time for Beverly D’Angelo, a very funny replacement for Charlton Heston as the Omega boss. There are at least some OK guest stars, including Matthew Lillard, who is so good in his appearance that if the show hits for CBS, I can safely guarantee he will either become a recurring piece of the ensemble or be given a spinoff. As a result, the chronically underused Gonzaga is the show’s most thoroughly appealing element. She has a clear skill set, albeit one for which the value of all those aforementioned recreational interests is a tiny bit silly, as well as an emotional investment in the life that she and Harry lived before. Helen, incidentally, is now a community college linguistics professor with an aptitude for languages, tae-bo and yoga, all of which will come in mighty handy when she learns the truth about Harry’s secret identity and VERY quickly becomes a part of his world of espionage and intrigue. But once the show folds her into the team, the overall familiarity of the material makes it hard to get invested. It’s hard to tell exactly what Harry is here, especially since after the prelude, we get almost none of Harry the secret-keeper or Harry the solo spy. As a TV show, CBS’ True Lies is a bottle rocket.

Like the film, the TV show centers on a spy named Harry (Steve Howey). His wife, Helen (Ginger Gonzaga), and their two teens believe him to be a dull computer ...

As a result, there is a lack of passion between the pair. It makes her the most watchable part of any scene, as she perfects that balance between action and comedy. While it was necessary to update Helen into a more savvy wife with her own skills and knowledge, bringing her into the fold so quickly is also the show’s biggest mistake. Within 26 minutes of the first episode, Harry’s cover is blown and Helen is thrust into his life as a spy. She believes her marriage is in a rut until her friend wonders whether the extended trips and secretive phone calls could be an affair. So when it came to adapting the film into a TV show, changes were necessary.

"True Lies" - Pictured (L-R): Steve Howey as Harry Tasker and Ginger Gonzaga as Helen Tasker. Photo: Alan Markfield/CBS ©2021 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. Neither ...

Nix wants to be clear that, “the thing that was reinforced again and again as we went through the season was that the essence of True Lies isn't spectacle. He says that the series, ‘invites the audience to laugh and have some fun’ and Nix is urging everyone to, “remember that whatever insanity might be going on in the world, we are all human beings trying to do our best. Finding a way to do all of those things without having the comedy undermine the action or without having the heart of the family story overwhelming the other elements, it's a balance.” He says that his team uncovered why it’s difficult to do in the television world, explaining, “One of the challenges is that you’ve got to do all the things that a regular spy show would do, and then you've got to do all the things that a family drama would do. “We definitely had those tonal touchstones, and a lot of them were pretty retro.” This is just one of the reasons why he and the creative team felt, “we wanted to do something on our own.

The new show, premiering March 1 (10 p.m.), is based on the James Cameron blockbuster of the same name. It follows Harry Tasker (Steve Howey), who's married ...

It was a conscious decision to make it our own.” “There is the Starlight Foundation, which gets people to come and talk to these kids and families at the Children’s Hospital of LA, so I got to see and talk to her there, years ago. “I got to meet Jamie Lee Curtis,” he said. “‘True Lies’ came out in the ’90s, and I was a huge fan of that movie. “’Conan The Barbarian,’ and those swords and sandals ’80s movies – that’s what I was into,” said Howey. “I vowed to never do [Schwarzenegger’s] accent,” he told The Post.