"It's like if The Dude was Buddha, but he was also Hitler and they have to fight to the death. Inside a computer." - My girlfriend, summerizing Tron: Legacy.
Back in April, I saw a major studio release so abominable, so utterly incompetent, that I had to create a blog in order to vent my displeasure into the collective social consciousness of the internet. That movie was Clash of the Titans. And that blog was...this blog.
Friday I saw the worst movie I have seen in theatres since that movie. A movie that combined the interminable, talky boredom of the Star Wars prequels with the expository, nonsensical, quasi-religious bullshit of the Matrix sequels. What film could be so stupifyingly terrible, you ask, while still costing $170 million to produce and another $100 million to market? That film, gentle readers, was Tron: Legacy.
A brief word of explanation. Despite being raised on the neon-tinged, poorly rendered media that defined the 80's and early 90's, I have yet to see the original Tron, which opened to mixed critical reception and moderate box office success in the summer of 1982, before becoming a cult classic on home video (although the DVD is currently out of print and you can't get it on Netflix). Any curiousity I had about checking out the original has been bludgeoned into submission by the shitfest that was its sequel.
Tron: Legacy begins two decades after programmer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) disappeared into The Grid, a virtual world of his own creation. His rakishly disaffected son, Sam (Garret Hedlund), has eschewed ownership of his father's now multi-billion dollar company ENCOM, in favor of playing cruel pranks on its douchey board of directors, which involve pirating their software and basejumping off the roof of their corporate headquarters. Seriously.
Sam is eventually lured to his father's old video arcade where he is sucked into The Grid, a digital frontier that seems to consist exclusively of ultimate frisbee deathmatches, being chased on/by vehicles made of light and lots of really, really straight lines. Here, he must team up with his now aged father and a smoking hot computer program played by Olivia Wilde, to defeat CLU, his father's meglomaniacal computerized twin, (played by a creepily youthful CG rendering of Jeff Bridges) and escape to the real world before some portal closes.
This film is the directorial debut of Joseph Kosinski, who previously enjoyed what I imagine was a perfectly lucrative career as a architect specializing in computer-generated 3-D designs. And while that's a fairly desirable background if you want to make a fussy, clinical, visually specific film, it's apparently no help when trying to create compelling characters, steady narrative momentum or any kind of coherent story. I really don't know where to begin.
Oh wait, yes I do. I've never seen Garrett Hedlund in anything before, but he must have done something impressive at some point to land what is ostensibly an action lead in a major holiday film. None of that hypothetical skill is on display here, where he plays Sam as a bland, whiny punk who's too hung up on his daddy issues to bother being the head of a Fortune 500 company. Additionally, (and I guess this is the writers fault) he's apparently become Batman in the years following the first film, able to both break into major corporations and escape via basejumping as well as kick the shit out of computer programs with his sweet kung-fu disc throwing skillz.
Although the screenwriters make what should have been a smart move in getting Sam into The Grid as soon as possible, glossing over the twenty years between his dad leaving and the current events of the film leaves him a boring, blank slate, which Hedlund attempts to fill with pissy one-liners and his Aryan good looks. He actually made me miss Sam Worthington, who at least looks like a real person.
So Sam enters The Grid and is immediately wrangled into a disc fight, which is apparently obligatory due to their appearence in the first film. Despite the gratuitous kung-fu moves demonstrated by his first opponent (Tron himself), the disc battle pretty much consists of them standing in a transparent box and throwing these things back and forth at each other. This is then followed by a light bike chase where bikes chase each other until the pursuers swerve and explode for some reason. While this film may share the overly neat, hyper-sanitized action style of The Matrix films, at least those movies had inventive fight choreography and settings. Every action scene in this film takes place against a basically blank background and is about as perfunctory and dull as something can be while still being called an 'action scene'.
So after all this there's about an hour of the movie where people go to places and talk about things then go to other places to talk about more stuff. This would be a terrible way to structure an action movie, but you know what, this isn't just an action movie. It's technically an action/sci-fi/drama. So all this downtime might be a prime opportunity to explain the setting of the film, a.k.a. provide a single fucking tangible detail about what is happening. Instead, Hedlund and Bridges monotone to each other about 'bio-digital jazz' and 'isomorphic algorithms", all the while not really explaining anything about how this world works or what the stakes are in the conflict with CLU. Apparently he wants to escape into the real world with his facist army of reprogrammed soldiers and...conquer our world? I don't really see the US military having a problem killing the shit out of a bunch of guys with glowing batons and see-through motorcycles. Also, Wilde's character Quorra is the last of some kind of self-generating race of people who evolved in The Grid. What does that have to do with anything? Not much apparently. And the entire climax hinges on these discs that everyone wears on their backs which contain...your memories? Your soul? But are also keys. And weapons. None of this makes any fucking sense.
The saddest part is that there seems to be a lot of potential with in the framework of this story to get into some deeper issues. The evolution and value of artificial life. Exploring the psyche of Kevin Flynn via an entire world that he created. Instead we get a trite father/son story played out by two actors who have no chemistry and seem to be running on auto-pilot. Which is especially bad in Bridges case, considering how lively he is in every other movie I've ever seen him in ever. He's just playing an older, lamer version of The Dude, spouting Zen nonsense but with none of the wit or nuance that made The Dude so enjoyable.
Despite me wanting to punch Disney in the face for wasting almost $300 million on something so goddamn boring, I will attempt to be diplomatic and end with a few things about this movie that didn't suck:
- Although I still might not be able to pick her out of a line-up of other skinny brunette actresses, I was surprised by the child-like wonder Olivia Wilde injected into Quorra, when she could have just as easily been a tight-lipped, aloof Mila Jovovich character. Although, in a way she did remind me of the only interesting action hero Jovovich has ever played. Too bad she has to get rescued at the end, despite being the most badass character in the movie.
- Michael Sheen is great as the flamboyant club owner Zuse, despite his character being completely superfluous to the plot.
- The 3D in this movie was actually pretty sharp and didn't give me a headache. CG Jeff Bridges looked pretty crappy though.
- The Daft Punk score was pretty cool. Just listen to that instead of seeing the movie.
Man, was very interested to hear what you thought of this. I'm surprised the reviews weren't worse than they were, otherwise, because this sounds stupid as shit. And that AV Club retrospective on the first Tron made me never, ever want to have to sit through it. Looks so tacky.
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