The smash 1994 spy comedy gets a small-screen adaptation with Steve Howey stepping in for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ginger Gonzaga taking the Jamie Lee Curtis role.
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| James Cameron - 'True Lies' |
Review of James Cameron's 'True Lies' on Meek CBS.
If you despise James Cameron's 1994 hit True Lies — it's weird, sexist, xenophobic, and the pacing stops for an hour in the middle — it's probably best not to associate CBS' True Lies with it.
True Lies
The Bottom Line
Replaces the thrills and ickiness with amiable blandness.
Airdate: 10 p.m. Wednesday, March 1 (CBS)
Cast: Steve Howey, Ginger Gonzaga, Omar Miller, Erica Hernandez, Mike O'Gorman, Annabella Didion, Lucas Jaye
Creator: Matt Nix
What Nix has done is recreate the first act of the Cameron movie (and its French source material, the 1991 film La Totale!),
skipped over all the uncomfortable and icky stuff that makes up the
middle and leapt ahead to the sequels that we never got — probably
because, as this series suggests, those sequels might have run the risk
of being borderline generic.
Shameless veteran Steve Howey steps into the Arnold
Schwarzenegger role as Harry Tasker, an all-purpose spy within the
ultra-secretive Omega Sector. Harry is constantly going off on
international jaunts to save the world, but as far as his wife Helen
(Ginger Gonzaga) knows, he’s a boring computer salesman, prone to
missing key events in the lives of teenage kids Dana (Annabella Didion)
and Jake (Lucas Jaye). 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.
For almost a decade, CBS has been attempting to adapt True Lies as a series, and I'm sure there were iterations of the property that sought to push the reveal of Harry's hidden identity back to the first season finale or so. Perhaps there were even — Heaven forbid — some versions that sought to devise a modern counterpart for the movie's Bill Paxton adultery storyline. I'm honestly pleased it wasn't their choice, since the longer Helen stays unaware of Harry's secret, the more it invalidates the observational skills that would ultimately make her a valuable part of the team. Yet, once she is integrated into the team, the general familiarity with the subject makes it difficult to invest in.
And if you like convoluted secret-keeping, there are still Helen and Harry’s two kids, who barely register so far.
In Helen, Gonzaga has the series’ only fully developed character,
through the four episodes sent to critics. 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. The writers have even tailored
certain aspects of Helen’s backstory, including her Filipino upbringing,
to line up with aspects of Gonzaga’s biography, a specificity that
isn’t evident anywhere else. As a result, the chronically underused
Gonzaga is the show’s most thoroughly appealing element. She’s reliably
funny, blending comedy into her physicality, and her uncertainty
integrating with the Omega team gives the series some necessary human
undercurrents.
Howey, unfortunately, has much less to play. The movie could always
fall back on the silly disconnect between a character built like
Schwarzenegger but given an ultra-nerdy, ultra-unassuming cover
identity. 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. 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. Howey and Gonzaga bicker with
some occasional spark, but the writing has insufficient cleverness to
really stand out, never rising to the crackle that existed between
Michael and Fiona in the early run of Nix’s Burn Notice.
