TRON: Legacy (In theatres) -- Dir. Joseph Kosinski. Starring Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde.
Neon sci-fi film good enough to make the original look even worse.
Two decades after the mysterious disappearance of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) enters the virtual world created by his father. There he finds that a software version of Flynn has taken over the grid and now plots to conquer the real world using the awesome power of 1980s technology.
Flynn, meanwhile, hides in exile, having once again taken up the robes of The Dude. Some people think he should confront his clone, but that's just, like, their opinion, man.
The film's most noteworthy special effects achievement is in allowing Bridges to play a younger version of himself under CGI makeup, an effect that is almost, but not quite, convincing. Humanity has made a great leap forward in the field of Jeff Bridges-simulation technology, but we still have a long way to go.
Curiously, Disney has pulled all copies of the original Tron from shelves at a time when it could reasonably expect to sell them by the truckload. This is probably because Disney realizes the same thing that most people who watched the movie as adults have realized: Tron wasn't very good. Its imaginative premise and cutting-edge special effects masked a plot and characters that could have been pulled from a generic episode of a Saturday morning cartoon. The company likely wants viewers going into the new film armed with only their rose-tinted childhood memories of the original.That's because Tron: Legacy is everything you remember Tron to be, but that it was not. Modern effects and storytelling fill in the missing pieces that imaginations once did.
Legacy's plot is still nothing profound or complex, but it isn't supposed to be. Tron is primarily a sensory experience, with trippy visuals and a glorious soundtrack by Daft Punk. And perhaps surprisingly, even the character interactions are pretty compelling this time, particularly the dynamic between Flynn and his evil twin.
On the other hand, something about Tron: Legacy feels like it had a chainsaw taken to it late in the writing or editing stage. Pieces are carefully set up only to provide no payoff down the road. A lightcycle billed as "the fastest thing on the grid" is impounded after a leisurely three-second drive. Flynn is hinted to have godlike powers that amount to nothing. A major character from the first film returns, but we never see his face--we're just expected to take the word of the other characters that it's him.
But overall, Tron-loving weirdos couldn't have hoped for a better sequel.
Rated PG for destruction of data.4 out of 5
Salt (DVD/Blu-Ray) -- Dir. Phillip Noyce. Starring Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor.Astonishingly stupid thriller in which everyone is a Russian spy. Or are they?
Angelina Jolie plays a CIA agent accused of being a Russian assassin. There's a lot of ludicrous backstory about training camps for Russian super-children, and the main character's apparent loyalties swing back and forth six or seven times over the next hour. It's not a spoiler as long as I don't tell you where they end up, right?
Salt is not content to be merely a stupid action movie. It thinks it's enormously clever, which means it's jam-packed with nonsensical twists and unnecessarily complicated assassination plots.
I can't say any more than that without ruining it, so instead I'll talk about a completely different story that's equally moronic. Then you can get an idea of what Salt is like by analogy.
A highly-trained two-month-old Irish baby named Ms. G is sent to assassinate the emperor of Quebec. But because he's so hard to reach, Ms. G is planted in the ground where the emperor's underground bunker will one day be built, so that she's in place when the time to strike comes 30 years later. But on that day, it turns out that the emperor is also an Irish spy, and the whole thing was part of an elaborate plot to assassinate the king of Iceland. The king appears at that moment and blows himself up, all to spark a war between Liechtenstein and the Principality of Sealand.
There. It's like you just watched Salt. Imagine cheesy flashbacks and unoriginal action sequences to complete the picture.
Honestly, who is still impressed by the old "jump from an overpass onto a moving truck" routine?
That's how I get to work in the morning.
Rated PG-13 for Soviet brainwashing.2.5 out of 5
