Tron' takes itself too seriously

Like "Avatar," "Tron: Legacy" takes us into a world of digital imagination. It's a gorgeous sequel to 1982's "Tron," a video game movie and a cult hit that was decades ahead of its time.

But also like "Avatar," "Legacy" is a film too in love with its own good looks. And like the first "Tron," the sequel is a bit of a slog, a generally humorless quest inside the computer grid in which a son searches for his digitally disembodied father while the father seeks salvation for humanity through the digi-verse he created but which has taken on a life of its own.

Garrett Hedlund ("Friday Night Lights") is Sam Flynn, son of Kevin (Jeff Bridges), the games-and-grid guru who stumbled into the Digital New World back in 1982. Dad disappeared in 1989, the film tells us, so Sam has grown up a rich, motorcycle-riding rebel.

Then Dad's old partner (Bruce Boxleitner, back from the original film) says he's been paged by the phone from Kevin's long-closed arcade. That sends Sam to the office where Kevin was digitized and drops him onto the computer grid his dad created. He's soon forced to race light cycles and do disc battles to survive the machinations of the evil Clu, Dad's alter ego, played by a digitally de-aged Jeff Bridges, who looks as if he could also play the train conductor in a "Polar Express" sequel.

Sam's efforts to escape lead him to other digital worlds, and the corporate villains from the real world who helped create this mess are forgotten as he journeys on and off the grid in an effort to reconnect with his father and his father's creations.

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Then, 80 minutes in, Brit character actor Michael Sheen shows up as Castor, a bon vivant grid program who looks like David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust incarnation and who's played by Sheen as if he's ready to star in a "Rocky Horror Picture Show" remake. The actor's hamming brings the movie to life.

"Behold," he bellows to the other programs drinking at his swank digital bar, "the son of our creator!"

When Bridges himself, an aged guru stuck in time, blurts "You're messin' with my zen thing, man," we're left to wonder how "Legacy" might have gone down had the movie's creators not taken the damned thing so seriously. They've unfortunately saddled the movie with a lack of humor and personality that robs it of any real emotion.

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