10 Incredible Movie Parodies Nobody Noticed

10. True Lies

Though few would hold True Lies up as one of James Cameron's very best movies, it is a terrifically entertaining action comedy in its own right, even if some ding it a few points for how aggressively over-the-top and ridiculous it is.

Yet the film, a steroid-infused remake of the 1991 French spy comedy La Totale!, is conceived from the ground-up as a thinly-veiled parody of cartoonish action films and spy thrillers, a fact which many viewers seemingly failed to appreciate.

By the time Jamie Lee Curtis drops an Uzi down a flight of stairs and it shoots all the bad guys dead, and the movie climaxes with Arnold Schwarzenegger firing the Big Bad from a missile while quipping, "You're fired," it's probably worth considering the possibility that one of the most successful filmmakers of all time is in on the joke.

That's not to ignore how utterly absurd it is to cast somebody of Arnie's oak-like stature in the role of a conspicuous secret agent.

The beauty of True Lies is that it manages to be a genuinely thrilling example of the very genre it's parodying, which is much harder than it sounds.