3. Cliffhanger (1993) vs. True Lies (1994)
As we head into the 90s for our third comparison, our boys began to delve into the more intelligent and suspenseful high octane style of action films, as was the trend.
Cliffhanger was the first action movie that Sly made in the 90s and was met with critical and financial praise upon its release, and for very good reason.
Sly stars as mountain climber and rescue ranger Gabe Walker, a man wracked with guilt after failing to save his best friend Hal’s girlfriend from plunging to her death when he is dispatched to pick them up after they become stranded on a mountain peak. One year later Gabe joins Hal in responding to a distress call on the mountain. Turns out the call was bogus and the two find themselves pitted against a team of mercenaries led by Eric Qualen (a terrific villainous turn by John Lithgow), who are on the hunt for missing cases filled with $100 million in cash.
Cliffhanger certainly lives up to its title, as it works brilliantly as an edge-of-your-seat action thriller with Sly doing some of the most outrageous stunts of his career. He helped to pen the script yet again and created some truly memorable characters, most notably that of Qualen, who is just downright relentless and quite the enjoyable villain.
Sly plays Gabe with a hint of vulnerability, which lends the film a certain gravitas, and it further adds to the audience wanting to root for him to succeed and survive. The action is hard-hitting and quite violent in places, but the movie never crosses into the violence for the sake of violence territory, which keeps it nicely grounded. Director Renny Harlin, who cut his teeth with the highly enjoyable Die Hard 2, paces the action effectively and builds the tension to a mammoth of a finale.
One year after Cliffhanger was released, a third collaboration between Arnie and his Terminator director James Cameron took place and delivered what can only be described as an unapologetically outrageous and wacky love letter to the action genre. True Lies had a premise that, if it were in the wrong hands, could have been a complete and utter disaster. However, this is Arnie and James Cameron we’re talking about. It’s a dream team that could make anything work.
The film has Arnie starring as Harry Tasker, a seemingly mild-mannered computer salesman who has the average day at the office, or so he would have his wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis) and daughter Dana (a young Eliza Dushku) believe. Harry is in fact a secret government agent working for the CIA who soons finds himself up against the Crimson Jihad, led by Aziz (Art Malik), who plan to detonate stolen nuclear warheads on American soil.
True Lies has everything going for it, likeable characters from all ends, pulse-pounding action sequences that became increasingly creative as the film progressed, and laugh out loud dialogue and banter. Not a moment of this movie is without a grain of self-awareness, and it is because of this that audiences can have a lot of fun with it.
This one really speaks for itself. It’s a movie that is virtually impossible to dislike (at least from my perspective) and aside from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, True Lies could very well take the number 1 spot of best action movie of the 1990s.
The winner: True Lies, of course. Cliffhanger is a brilliant piece of filmmaking and is a worthy contender but True Lies was such a fun entry into the genre and worked on a level that just simply cannot be replicated.