Main cast: Jared Leto (Ares), Greta Lee (Eve Kim), Evan Peters (Julian Dillinger), Jodie Turner-Smith (Athena), Hasan Minhaj (Ajay Singh), Arturo Castro (Seth Flores), Cameron Monaghan (Caius), Sarah Desjardins (Erin), Gillian Anderson (Elisabeth Dillinger), and Jeff Bridges (Kevin Flynn)
Director: Joachim Rønning

Tron: Ares is just Disney unable to help itself and destroying another IP that it has purchased. It has everything that people dislike in recent Disney “reboots”, “remakes”, and “sequels” that are actually a sneaky attempt at rebooting the IP into something more fitting for its idea of a modern audience.

Tron is actually a niche IP, now that I think of it, so I suppose it getting a sequel that nobody asked for is a testament to Jared Leto desperate to have a career again that doesn’t involve getting cancelled every other day or Disney getting bored because it has been a few days before it destroys something and loses a lot of money doing it. Maybe both, who knows. 

So yes, this is basically an attempt to erase the elements Disney considers unpalatable — read: white male leads of previous entries — yet at the same time trying to pander to the old audience by including tedious memberberries. Remember Tron Kevin Flynn? Remember Sark? Remember… just don’t remember the movies and shows that came after the first movie and before this one, because Disney wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants the good stuff that people liked in Tron, but it also wants to be rid of those things that people liked but it doesn’t.

So:

• The guy from Tron: Legacy is now MIA, because he was so useless that ENCOM almost collapsed…
• Until our girlboss, Eve Kim, steps in. She’s naturally the best in everything and anything, much better than any icky white man, and she is also smug and has only one facial expression throughout. The standard girlboss that one has come across in so many of Disney’s shows, and just as boring because she doesn’t need any character development at all. 

Get that? The IP is now Eve’s, so suck it chuds. Girls rule… although the box-office of this movie begs to differ, guffaw.

Just like other Disney’s “sequels” of late, this one has a story that doesn’t seem to care about continuity or cohesiveness with the previous lore. It’s now some battle of the AI companies.

• ENCOM is now a good company, you see, because it has a girlboss in charge, every staff wears white, and it uses its awesome AI powers to make nice things like food and such.
• Dillinger Systems is an evil company, because it has a CEO that is another icky tic-ridden white young zillionaire boss — seriously, didn’t we just see this fellow in that atrocious Alien: Earth? — and the staff wears red, the color of Satan, and they sell their AI staff to the military and such. Evil!

Jared Leto is the only white guy allowed to play the lead in this movie, since he is also the producer, and he is Ares, the latest of Dillinger Systems’ “Master Control Program (MCP)”. Alas, the super soldier cannot exist for more than 29 minutes after getting 3D-printed into real world, how vexing. 

Naturally, talented super genius best in the world Eve has the special code that will grant all 3D-printed things permanence in the real world, so the Dillinger idiot sends Ares and the second-in-command Athena to get the code and… and… oh, who cares.

This movie is full of inconsistencies.

• The 29-minute rule only matters when it’s convenient; otherwise, the movie disregards this rule to advance the plot.
• The entire problem with Dillinger Systems can be overcome by the folks of ENCOM just moving 31-minutes away, as for some reason the Dillinger idiot insists on sending armed soldiers that will go 404 after 29 minutes (well, except when Jared Leto wants more screentime, then it doesn’t matter). 
• Characters seem to forget things that happened just a while ago and act being startled by something that they have encountered before.
• And on and on.

Also, Ares is supposed to be some anti-hero that finds some kind of turnaround, but it happens so abruptly that I feel like I’m supposed to be rooting for him just because he’s Jared Leto. Meanwhile, Eve is so bland and boring, her only “vulnerability” is just an excuse to validate her as the hacker and girlboss supreme. 

Anyway, to conclude, the script is stupid, illogical, and even inconsistent, making me wonder whether the whole thing had been mangled and re-mangled by a committee of suits like most of Disney’s shows. Meanwhile, the main characters are bland and boring, and Greta Lee seems to be capable of only one facial expression: at the brink of calling for the manager. These two reasons are enough to make this movie one that is half wince-inducing and half boring and blah.

Jared Leto does have an innate charisma underneath all that icky “I’m Asmongold… if Asmongold also hadn’t bathed in a year!” facade of Ares, but he can only do so much when everything else about this movie is determined to be a failure in every way. As a producer, shouldn’t he vet the casting and script more thoroughly? Guess he can only blame himself when this movie bombed so hard at the box-office that the resulting fallout could very well be the final nail on the coffin where his career lies to be buried. 

I’d let Mr Mustard review that previous Tron movie in his own sweet time, but honestly, as mid as that movie was, it was much, much better in comparison to this one.

So yes, another Disney-owned IP bites the dust. Anyone taking bets on which one that Disney will destroy next? My money is on a live action remake of Ice Age with a trans female mammoth, gay sabretooth tiger, and a strong black girlboss saber-toothed tiger.