Director: Joseph Kosinski
Cast: Garrett Hedlund, Jeff Bridges, Olivia Wilde, Bruce Boxleitner
Have I Seen it Before: Yes. The thing I remember most from seeing this one in the theater is that it was shortly after I bought a used PT Cruiser which I drove for two years, despite the film never working right.
That’s probably a bad sign, right?
Did I Like It: Whereas the original Tron (1982) managed to use the limitations (both then and now) of computer animation to great effect depicting a world that, by its very nature, was never meant to look natural.
That film wasn’t nearly as successful as Disney might have hoped, but became a cult favorite over the years, hence someone somewhere in the Mouse House thinking that a sequel might be warranted, if not urgent. By the time they got things together, something had happened with movies. CGI became ubiquitous, but it didn’t become better enough to have viewers view it through anything other than jaundiced eyes.
With those cards stacked against it, does a Tron sequel have any kind of hope of wowing—if even to the point of becoming only a cult film like its predecessor, to say nothing of capturing the public imagination at the level one probably needs for a movie costing over 100 million?
Maybe, almost… But not quite. The computer realities Sam Flynn (Hedlund, sort of unmemorable) find himself in are not the simple geometries his father dealt with, but instead a myst filled laser-tag arena that fails to feel either clever or believable.
I’m not even willing to give the special effects the benefit of the doubt for depicting artificiality. Clu (Bridges) looks like an animatronic for most of the film, which might be forgiven as he is a computer program, but the same effects work is used to portray Kevin Flynn (also Bridges) in 1989, and that works a fair sight less. That doesn’t even begin to cover that Bridges’ main level of performance as Flynn is to do a warmed-over riff on his work in The Big Lebowski (1998), which feels roughly right, if a little pat.
I will say though, that the film is helpfully titled. This is a legacy sequel through and through, but an imminently average one, at that. It fails to capture the ingenious quality of the original, and seems designed throughout to satisfy a list of elements studio executives would want in a film, fi no one else.