True Lies/YMMV

• Acceptable Ethnic Targets:
  • Arab villains. Downplayed in that one of Arnold's colleagues is an intelligent Arab-American, who at least in his scenes qualifies as the Only Sane Man.
  • The film did receive some criticism for portraying the terrorists as "stereotypically" Muslim. This was 7 years before 9/11. See Harsher in Hindsight.
• Acceptable Targets: The conversation that takes place between Harry and Helen in the quote at the top of the main page.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Curtis' famous striptease.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • Harry's accent gets thicker and thicker as he's succumbing to the Truth Serum, and the way he constructs his sentences gradually begins to sound more like German than English.
  • Remember Dana in the beginning of the movie managing to steal Harry's partner's money from his coat without them knowing? It comes in handy when she steals the key to a nuclear warhead while being hostage to a room full of terrorists without being noticed.
• Evil Is Sexy: Juno Skinner.
• Fridge Logic: Whatever elite spy organization Harry works for seems to be amazingly tolerant of their agents using a lot of money, time and resources to stalk their loved ones. Harry's partner does point out repeatedly that he shouldn't be using agency resources for his personal issues, but Harry doesn't listen. When his partner flat out tells Harry he cannot call on-duty surveillance teams to follow his wife, Harry reveals he knows his partner screwed up a big operation because he was getting sex from a hooker, and kept quiet about it. This results in the partner having to cover for Harry with the never-seen Big Bosses a lot. It seems a lot of other agents, contacts and assets owe Harry favors (or he has leverage over them) that he can call in at his discretion. Which is actually not unlike real world spy networks.
  • It can also be assumed that, like the action movies it's broadly parodying, Tasker earned a lot of slack for prior behavior by keeping the US from being nuked.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The whole plotline of fanatical Jihadists attacking America.
  • Dedicating the entire second act to Arnold suspecting his wife is cheating on him, given what we now know about his own proclivities.
• Retroactive Recognition: There's a reason Faith and Echo are such Badass Action Girls: they're Ahnold's daughter. Anyone wanting to know what a younger Faith might be like...Dana nails it cold.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The fight at the Florida Keys and the climactic battle, achieved using a life-sized mockup of the Harrier jet mounted on a gimbal rig.