Jared Leto leads another lifeless trip into the digital realm.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Featuring a charmless Jared Leto in the lead, “Tron: Ares” is without doubt one of the worst big-budget, major studio (Disney) releases of the year. Come back, ”Snow White.” All is forgiven.
The third entry in the “Tron” franchise, which kicked off in 1982 with Steven Lisberger’s “cult film” “Tron,” a groundbreaking attempt to depict virtual realities on the big screen (I found them, the story and the acting boring beyond belief). Perhaps that’s why it took 28 years to produce the sequel, Joseph Kosinski’s “Tron: Legacy” (2010), which got mediocre reviews from even the fans.
“Tron: Ares,” which was directed by Norwegian Joachim Ronning, who used to make great films such as “Kon-Tiki” (2012), is a punishing combination of a shallow screenplay by Jesse Wigutow, characters you do not care about and barely know, a sniveling villain out of an “Austin Powers” film and a hero in the form of mullet-sporting, Oscar-winner Leto in a suit suggesting a superhero named Disco.
Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) and Quorra (Olivia Wilde) of “Tron: Legacy” do not return, luckily for them. Wigutow’s screenplay starts out using digitized news reporters to fill us in on the exposition. Jeff Bridges’ digital pioneer Kevin Flynn is still “missing.” In scenes set inside an icy mountain retreat, Eve Kim (Greta Lee, “Past Lives”), CEO of ENCOM, studies Flynn’s floppy discs in search of a “permanence code” that will make it possible for digital entities to remain in the real world for longer than the 29 minute-limit currently in effect before they burn up and turn to ashes.
“Tron: Ares“ lifts tropes from “Star Wars,” “Transformers” films, the “Mission: Impossible” and “Avengers” franchises. It has little of its own except those digitally rendered worlds, which look like the interior of an expensive air filter. In the digital realm run by the film’s villain, named Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters, TV’s “Monster”), head of Dillinger Systems, Greek-god-of-war-named Ares is the master control (he’s a glorified Ring camera). Among his fellow warrior-guards are Athena (a badass Jodie Turner-Smith) and less imposing Caius (Cameron Monaghan). Is that Caius for Caligula?
We get fights with illuminated Frisbees and light-saber sticks, “Star Wars”-like fighters, a snowmobile, a big Jet-Ski, giant, floating war machines and chases on ugly lightcycles. Parts of Vancouver, Canada, where the film was shot and is set, are destroyed (in make-believe fashion only). Eve’s backstory is that she has a beloved dead sister named Tess. The entire enterprise suggests a digitized adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1980s roller-blading musical “Starlight Express.”
Accompanying most of the action is a blaring score credited to Nine Inch Nails, as opposed to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. I’m not sure if the composers knew how loudly the filmmakers were going to play their music. But it is an unpleasant experience, a Daft Punk-like, sub-woofer-heavy sound played at ear-slitting, gut-punching levels. Despite all the aural torture, you cannot escape the feeling that nothing you are watching is important or interesting.
Leto’s Ares, who makes the transition to the real world (Am I supposed to get excited about this?) gazes at things and at the camera as if he’s trying to bend them to his will. It’s not working, Jared. He and Lee are supposed to have chemistry. But you pray they will not kiss. Someone’s a big fan of Depeche Mode and their 1981 hit “Just Can’t Get Enough.” Julian Dillinger takes the form of a Wizard of Oz-like, giant, digital face when he speaks to his digital servants in their realm. A police car is cut cartoonishly in half lengthwise. Poor Gillian Anderson, who deserves better, is here as Julian’s scolding mother, adding, I assume, a “Succession”-like element to Wigutow’s slim story. But when someone shouted, “Commence extraction,” I hoped that I was the one being extracted.
‘Tron: Ares’
Rating: PG-13, violence, action.
Cast: Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jillian Anderson
Director: Joachim Ronning
Writer: Jesse Wigutow
Running time: 1 hour, 59 minutes
Where to Watch: In theaters
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