Care to Tango?

There’s something to be said for the moxie of the ridiculous spy movie. It’s fun to escape our often mundane culture for a moment and enter a world in which the things that people do on a daily basis actually matter. And even while those actions are so important, any good spy movie contains a myriad of preposterous jokes. For the moment, my favorite example of such a film is True Lies with the Governator as American spy Harry Tasker and Jamie Lee Curtis as his wife Helen.

In True Lies, the high-consequence premise is that a terrorist organization has obtained a nuclear bomb and managed to transport it within U.S. borders. This counter-terrorism theme, especially given the present political spectrum in our country, seems pretty tired on the surface. But the movie manages to make that premise interesting by contrasting it with some of the more mundane elements of our culture. For instance, Harry Tasker’s cover story, that he is a sales rep for a computer company, comes to the forefront in a bathroom scene with Helen in which he ties his tie and goes off on a fairly detailed monologue about some new software that his company wants to market. The monologue sounds just dull enough to make the audience laugh, but not boring enough to make them lose interest. The banality of such a thing makes the terrorist premise tolerable because it’s absurd that a highly trained, talented spy would have to live under such a tedious cover story. And as many of you know, there are few things I love more in films than absurdity and its inherent moxie.

Perhaps the best and most absurd part of True Lies occurs at the very beginning when Harry Tasker invades this huge Bavarian-looking mansion to get some kind of secret computer files. He sneaks in under the frozen moat or river or whatever using scuba gear. Then we see him putting on a miraculously dry tuxedo in preparation for entering the mansion. He comes in through the service door, handles a chef who questions by complaining about the garlic content of the buffet and asking the chef if he is preparing food for his dog in what is probably supposed to be perfect French, but what ends up being extraordinarily amusing German/Austrian-accented French. Then, when the guards notice the crack in the ice and people begin to look for an imposter in the party, Harry dances a spirited tango with suspicious and sexy Persian art dealer Juno Skinner. Then, he makes a dramatic escape right out of the front gate during which, on foot, he outruns armed pursuers on skis and snowmobiles. Now that’s moxie. It’s completely ridiculous, but it’s moxie, and it’s tremendously entertaining in a fun, escapist sort of way.

Does anyone else share my tendency toward ridiculous spy movies? Any Bond fans out there, for instance? What about XXX, that particularly ridiculous Vin Diesel film that takes a horribly serious shot at Bond and the effectiveness of spies like him? Am I a philistine simply for bringing up XXX?