| Action | MPAA:R |
I've been watching Arnold Schwarzenneger movies ever since my Dad took me and my little brother to see Conan the Barbarian. Apparently Mom wanted us guys out of the house for a while, so that afternoon Dad carted us off to a movie Mother definitely would not have approved of. I think we went because Dad was always reading Conan books, and was curious to see what the movies would be like. I remember it because it was the first rated R movie he'd ever taken us to, and Sandahl Bergman made quite an impression on me. Not as much as Arnold though, big (maybe even bigger than The Hulk), and funny (definitely funnier than The Hulk), and fighting for what was right in the world. That probably explains why there's a lot of Ahnuld flicks in the cabinet, including this one.
Harry, Helen, and Dana Tasker (Ahnuld, Jamie Lee Curtis and Eliza Dushku) appear to be an ordinary suburban family living in the D.C. area. Harry sells computer equipment, Helen is a legal secretary, and Dana is your average high schooler. Helen thinks her life is boring, and would like for something .. anything interesting to happen to her. She's about to get her wish. She meets a guy (Bill Paxton) during her lunch break who claims to be a secret agent. He's not, really, he's just a used car salesman who uses the secret agent bit to pick up women. The irony of it all is, Harry (her husband) is the one who's a secret agent. The film opens with Harry sneaking into one of those parties that always seem to be going on in a spy movie. His goal is the bad guys computer upstairs (where we get to see a charmingly Arabic version of windows .. wonder how much Bill Gates paid for that? Let's not kid ourselves, they probably had to pay him.), which has all the secret info on it. He attaches a transceiver to it so his partners in the van (Tom Arnold and Someone Else) can download and decode the information. As he's leaving he meets a Persian Antiquities dealer named Juno (Tia Carerre). They tango, and then Harry makes his escape in the snow (much like in several Bond flicks). As they arrive back home, Gib (Arnold (not Ahnuld)) takes Harry's spy ID's and makes sure he has all his computer salesman ID's, as well as a souvineer for his daughter. The next morning Harry bores Helen with talk of his 'sales trip' before Gib picks him up for work. They go in and have a meeting with their boss (Charlton Heston), who isn't to happy about the outcome of their mission. He berates them for a while, then Harry goes to visit Juno, not just because she's in town, but because she is working with the bad guys they're spying on. The bad guys are called the Crimson Jihad (oh those wonderful terrorist names), and they're not happy about the attention Juno is getting. The follow Harry and Gib after work, and try to kill Harry when he goes into a mall restroom. They fail (of course, this is Ahnuld's movie), and Harry finds out who the leader is. He also finds out about his wife's little spy friend. He gets some of the guys from the spy organization to help him bust up their little tryst. They cart Helen off to the interrogation room, where he finds out that Helen hasn't slept with the guy, and that she's just bored, so they set up a little adventure for her. The car guy get's taken out to the edge of a dam, where they (quite literally) scare the pee out of him. Helen goes to a hotel, where she dances sexy for what she thinks is a foreign agent (she's supposed to plant a bug), but is really Harry. Then after she beats the crap out of him with a telephone, the real bad guys show up and cart them off. Helen thinks they're after her, but Harry knows better, and tries to pass Helen off as a hooker. Doesn't work, Helen has his picture in a locket, so the terrorists cart them both off to an island in the Florida keys. They have several nuclear warheads that Juno smuggled into the country for them, and they want Harry to verify that fact to the authorities. Helen brought her purse with her, which was good, because Harry had secretly placed a homing transmitter in it, but very bad, because Helen had a family picture in it. The terrorists start the countdown on one of their bombs, as a demonstration, and leave the island, but not before Harry gets away. Gib and the rest of the gang show up shortly after, they evacuate the area, stop the terrorists' caravan, and rescue Helen. The bomb goes off, and Harry borrows a Harrier to go rescue his daughter from the bad guys who got away in a helicopter. The terrorists are holed up in the unfinished part of a Miami High-rise, with another bomb, and Harry's daughter. While they're announcing their demands to a TV crew, Dana steals the arming key from the bad guys (got tired of typing terrorists), and heads for the roof, where Harry rescues her, kills the bad guys, and saves Miami. Flash to a year later, and we find that Helen has joined the organization, and she and Harry go to another one of those spy parties, scare the piss out of the car guy again (he's a waiter at the party, and still using the spy line on women), and as the credits roll .. they tango.
This film was about as close to a 'do or die' situation as Schwarzenneger has ever been in. His previous film Last Action Hero, while not a bad movie, took a pounding at the box office. This film showed that people were still ready to watch another Ahnuld film. It also showed that Tom Arnold is actually a decent actor, regardless of what his ex-wife says about him. A lot of people complained that this film was degrading to women (probably based on the publicity still of Curtis tied in a chair with a hand grenade between her thighs - which I still haven't found in the movie); I think it's quite the opposite. Oh sure, the Helen character is a bit mousy, and sometimes slow to catch on, but how many times has a woman beat the crap out of Ahnuld on film? All three main females in this film show backbone, so what's the problem? How 'bout this, Ahnuld can't dance. His idea of the Tango is to walk back and forth, and hold his hand out while Curtis and Carerre slither around him. Incidentally, this is also the same way Bill Cosby tangos, if any of you ever watched that pathetic mystery show of his, you can confirm this. I also found it amusing that Curtis did many of her own stunts, but still had to rely on a Butt Double during the sexy dance sequence (the double is not as well endowed and Curtis,being a 36 year old mother, doesn't have the smooth butt of a 23 year old anymore). As those 2 items are really quite silly, I can't think of why you shouldn't watch this movie, unless your name is Rosanne.