Picture it. A movie comes out during your childhood. You don’t watch it because you are not interested in it, which is unusual because you are into everything. Not every movie is for you, and that is OK. At some point, you become a film critic. Decades, almost a lifetime, have passed. It is randomly your turn to cover major movies opening on October 10, 2025. So now, you finally must see “Tron” (1982) and realize that it spawned a film sequel and series. It is a mutual worst-case scenario because if I made “Tron,” I would not want me to review it either since I opted out when it was considered cool and cutting edge. OK, here we go: the review for “Tron: Legacy” (2010), the sequel to “Tron” and the second of three movies in the “Tron” franchise.
Trap Flynn in a virtual world the first time. Shame on you. Trap Flynn in a virtual world the second time. Shame on Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), who had a son, Sam (Owen Best), with a woman (wink), who remains nameless, is never shown and died. Sam is totally not his brain love child with Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) that they materialized from the virtual world because that would have been a more streamlined story. Kevin goes missing while working on a digital utopia with Tron (also Boxleitner) and another Clu (also a digitally de-aged Bridges), who is a different program from the first Clu in “Tron.” At twenty-seven, Sam (Garrett Hedlund) refuses to sit on his father’s company’s board, but he does interfere in vaguely vigilante hacker ways because it lets him do parkour, ride a motorcycle, set off alarms and have law enforcement chase him. Typical lawless, fatherless behavior, which is apparently perfect preparation for entering the digital world, which Sam does when he receives a page from his dad’s pager (remember those) then gets sucked into The Grid. Turns out Clu decided to usurp the users, become a dictator, have games that at least look better than the first movie and genocide ISOs (isomorphic algorithms), which just exist and were not made. Flynn is hiding out so Clu cannot access his identity disc (glowing frisbee that acts like Xena’s chakram, which is a step up) and get through the Portal to control the real world. If Flynn stops Clu, they would both die, and the digital world would disappear. Quorra (Olivia Wilde) still believes in working with users and helping the Flynn men. Will the the Flynns get out without endangering the real world?
No disrespect to Hedlund, but Sam is such a NPC character. The target audience for “Tron: Legacy” is hetero boys who are only beginning to get interested in girls but are not sure why. Sam has a dog, looks cool and does not follow the rules even though he literally makes them and owns everything thus is actually incapable of actual wrongdoing. Women in the virtual world cannot keep their hands off him and even strip him, but only to dress him up in something cooler. There is no nudity or sex, not that any are needed, but it is as if no one understands that the point of tight clothing and stripping people is as a tease to the next step. This world is aggressively sexless as if it does not exist. It is action figures come to life or rather, life without biology. It is like “Barbie” (2023) if Ken wrote it. (Even in the prior movie, there was a kiss.) Sam is the most characterless character in existence.
Clu is like a rival brother figure who wants to usurp dad and is frustrated because he thought that he was doing good. He is the only uncanny valley character in a film filled with computer programs, which was a bad move on Joseph Kosinski part. Make everyone who is a computer program look vaguely strange or give up on the de-aging thing since apparently MCU money was not available on this project. No amount of good acting can make an audience take a tyrant leader seriously if he looks so fake. If the massive list of people credited for screenplay and story had bothered, they could have at least ripped off Esau and Jacob then Sam would be more than sad little boy in a man’s body trying to find his daddy, and Clu would be more than a computer program who just likes doing bad things to vaguely eliminate imperfection. There is a minor storyline involving Tron and Clu, but it is kind of thrown in there for the sake of franchise continuity so the title can keep getting used. He is an afterthought, and Tron is more of a concept like Spartacus than a person, I mean computer program.
Bridges as Flynn is more interesting than he was in the first movie. Picture older man playing Neo, but with less fanfare. His costume is very elemental: all blacks or all white. When he wears black, the lining glows white. He is used too judiciously, and it is disappointing that Sam is not even a little bit like his daddy was back in the day because his computer programming prank skills do not translate to this world. Every time Bridges appears in “Tron: Legacy,” it does feel as if he is the god of this world.
Remember when Wilde was getting all the work. Quorra is vaguely interesting because she looks cool, can fight and seems to be into human beings, but the best part of “Her” (2013) was the fact that the AI was quite happy being an AI. Human beings flatter ourselves too much imagining that other entities want to be us, and it is just theoretical, not palpable here. When Flynn sees his son for the first time since entering The Grid, he asks about Sam’s life. He is a college dropout, has a dog (that dog is doing all the heavy lifting) and no girlfriend (no friends except Alan). It feels like Quorra exists, so Sam is not alone even though her vague storyline suggests something more special and underdeveloped. His daddy had to get a girl for his little boy. Any semblance of theology discussed in the first movie is reduced to vibes and aura in this one. It is so disappointing.
Other cool characters who seem as if they are going to be important but go nowhere are the four Sirens with Gem (Beau Garrett) breaking off to help Sam in his journey. Maybe they are nothing but a photo negative image of Robert Palmer video vixens with better supporting undergarments, but who would not be excited to all see “America’s Next Top Model” Yaya DaCosta as Siren #3. Michael Sheen chews the scenery as the all-white clad Castor and is the most fun that any viewer is going to witness when Flynn is not in God mode. Cillian Murphy makes a cameo as Edward Dillinger. I swear to God that I actually scoffed, “Who did they pay who looks like Cillian Murphy to give this movie a modicum of credibility?” Jokes on me because it was Murphy. I want to know how they got him to play an evil American who does nothing except talk slick for mere seconds. How good was the money?!? Did he lose a bet? Did he want to pay a bill and not get into debt so he jumped on the set and skedaddled off as soon as he could? Is he into the franchise? I love Murphy and want to know more! He better be in the next movie even if he is only parking his car or going to the water cooler. I don’t care. What is happening?
“Tron: Legacy” proves that with so many examples of oppression in fiction and reality, this movie had to come from a special place to be thinner in its spin on an evil leader and his forces than the last season of “Game of Thrones.” Say that you are safe in 2025 without saying that you are safe in 2025. No one could even imagine real threats and stakes. The world building and character development are laughable. It looks good. All sizzle, no steak. This is so boring! One more series and a movie to go, but now with more Jared Leto, who has not made things better for quite some time now.
