Review of TRON: Legacy (2010) by Themo M — 14 Jul 2013

The first Tron wasn't very good anyway, so what merited a sequel? Three reasons: Money, money, and money. Jeff Bridges returns for another chronicle in the series of a video game programmer who gets sucked into his creation, and Garett Hedlund plays his son. Olivia Wilde stars as Quorra, the gratuitously spandex-clad computerized character whose people appeared out of nowhere... because Plotline.

After a really dumb sequence in which (for some reason) he sabotages his dad's old company, Sam Flynn tries to track down where his dad went after all those years. Why now? Because his dad's pager went off. So he must be around somewhere. So, continuing the ingenious lapses in logic, he finds the machine that digitizes people and puts them in the game, and (duh) he gets zapped by it. Because otherwise we wouldn't have a movie.

After a CGI onslaught of epic proportions, we come to realize that, much like the original, this Tron will have plenty in the way of visuals, but nothing in plot. What a shock. Unfortunately, the special effects of the original could carry the movie BECAUSE THEY WERE GROUNDBREAKING. This movie is NOT groundbreaking in any sense of the word. Unless you count Olivia Wilde in spandex. Moving on...

My inner child probably thinks that this is the coolest movie around, but really, it's shit. Just extremely stylized, overproduced, noisy shit. Jeff Bridges plays a suddenly hippiefied version of his classic character Kevin Flynn, which kind of annoyed me. After The Big Lebowski, I get the feeling that directors have begun to think that all he can do is the neo-hippie kind of stuff that made that movie great. But it really doesn't work at all for this.

But Bridges is really the high point of the movie (as always). The film does away with the practical green-screen and realistic video game-like special effects that made the franchise popular, and instead goes crazy with CG and scenes that really should never have been put on screen. Case in point: Michael Sheen dancing like an idiot while his bar gets shot up. Dumbest. Sequence. Ever.

Still, this movie has to get credit, in that it probably knows how bad it really is. It revels in its badness, so much that the cheese factor ends up being totally entertaining. Also, Olivia Wilde in spandex. So I'll give it a nice 4/10 stars. Yeah, that's going easy on it. Seriously, there's no reason whatsoever to watch this movie. It's dumb fun, but it's dumb no matter how you slice it.