All right, all you guys, gals and geeks. This one's for you, because it didn't do very much for me.
The Walt Disney folks waited nearly 30 years to produce a sequel to "Tron," so "Tron: Legacy" should have benefited from 30 years of technical advancement. Sorry, it's a clunky script that forces clunky acting, and the 3-D routine is like all the others, shooting out of the screen and toward the audience. Some of the frisbee-throwing (okay, they're not real frisbees but they're round discs and they look and act like frisbees) is fun, but not a life-changing experience. The chases involve different chasers and chasees, but they all look like the World War II fighter plane action we saw in "Star Wars," though the vehicles have been changed to protect the innocent.
And I have yet to see a good story made into a 3-D movie. Can you envision "Casablanca" in 3-D? Or "Rear Window"? Or even "It's a Wonderful Life"? 3-D is a gimmick that allows equipment makers to sell fancy expensive stuff to theater owners, and to allow movie theaters to raise prices for its audiences. After you've seen one or two, they're all alike. Heck, Arch Oboler did it in 1952 with "Bwana Devil," and it hasn't improved much.
The "Tron" animation is good, and so is the music, even though it's loud and repetitive.
Jeff Bridges is Kevin Flynn, designer of computer games, but he's been missing for 20 years. Garrett Hedlund is his son, Sam, who finally decides to look for him, helped by Bruce Boxleitner and Olivia Wilde. And after their adventures inside the game, they come out the other side and the movie ends, so we can all obey the two-hour commercial and go out to buy the game.
Tron: Legacy opens today on several screens.
—Joe