If you walked out of Tron: Legacy in 2010 and consoled yourself with the thought that at least the Daft Punk soundtrack was great, the prepare for deja vu.
Nine Inch Nails, standing in for the retired French Touch pioneers, do most of the heavy lifting for a sequel that nobody asked for to a sequel that nobody loved.
At its best, the kinetic third Tron film could pass for a visual album. There is a premise, but only in the same sense that a fashion collection has a story.
Jared Leto’s titular hero, a superintelligent artificial intelligence (AI) program, is sucked into the real world by the cackling tech-bro supervillian Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters). Ares’ mission is to kidnap a corporate rival, Eve Kim (Greta Lee), and steal a “permanence” code that will allow Ares and other AI supersoldiers to live longer than their current half-hour real-world limit.
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But then Ares is moved by the sensation of raindrops, the music of Depeche Mode and the empathetic expressions of Lee. Obligatory references to Frankenstein and Pinocchio follow. Ares wants to be a real boy.
Gillian Anderson, channelling Margaret Thatcher, pops up as the baddie’s mummy. Jeff Bridges, playing a version of Lebowski rather than the hero of the original film, says “man” a few times and provides good vibes.
Leto and Lee bring fabulous styling – take a bow, costume designers Christine Bieselin Clark and Alix Friedberg – and great hair to the retro-future spectacle. Jodie Turner-Smith, playing Ares’ spurned former lieutenant, stomps and snarls with aplomb; Jeff Cronenweth’s swooping, diving camera angles are complemented with $150 million worth of bells and whistles. The motorbike chases are especially nervy.
If only – and here’s a compound irony – most of the dialogue didn’t sound like a glitchy AI wrote it. An overture, lazily explaining the world and backstory through a series of reports, fails to convince as an approximation of television news.
It’s all downhill from there. Ares’ pronounced affection for the 1980s may inspire this year’s answer to the similarly Leto-themed “Morbin’ time!” memes. Nobody expects a Tron movie to trade in hard science fiction, but there are too many moments requiring magical lasers.
Thankfully, Tron: Ares is less ponderous than Tron: Legacy, and the music is turned up to 11 in the hope you won’t notice all the shortcomings.
In cinemas from Friday
