Thank God for Bruce Boxleitner. I say this because he is the best part of this film. He is the only one who actually gives a performance worth watching and the only reason I gave it three stars instead of one.
Now for the rest of this godawful mess: The first film had an actually interesting and sustainable premise, namely, a formerly free system, steadily being corrupted by an increasingly bloated AI Master Control Program, with dual protagonists in the form of the fish-out-of-water Flynn and the heroic security program Tron. The film dabbles with theology, philosophy, and the nature of existence without ever becoming ham-fisted or preachy, and, while flawed, manages to tell a cracking good story in (for the time) ground-breaking style.
Legacy, on the other hand, manages to take that once-sturdy premise and twist it into some sort of muddled Hitler allegory, with no clear motivations for the heroes *or* villains, no clear explanations for exactly why Clu went bad, and, most of all, no clear explanation for just what the hell Clu thought he was gonna do in the real world. I mean, he did know the light cycles and light jets and stuff wouldn't work, right? He did realize that bullets would be perfectly capable of killing his solidified programs, right? He did know that his plan was the most *idiotic plan in the history of idiotic plans, right*?!!
Moving on to the extremely sloppy plotting, a sleazy chairman of the board and Ed Dillinger's son are introduced early in the film and never seen again. *Ed Freaking Dillinger*! Think about that for a minute. The son of the man whom Flynn presumably sent to prison at the end of the first film is introduced as working for the company of the man who sent his father to prison. He "fixes" something Flynn's son does as a (lame) prank, concocts a solution to the prank, and is *never freaking seen again*! This is only the first of many plot threads which are introduced and left unresolved in the finest Disney potboiler tradition.
I will not even get into the complete asspull represented by the "ISOs," whatever the hell they were, since I couldn't follow the gobbledy-gook Bridges was forced to spout in that scene. Let's just say that they're an anvilicious Jew analogy and leave it at that.
All of this complete mish-mash of utter crapola leads up to one of the worst, most anti-climactic endings in recent cinematic history. I took time out of the retching I was doing at Bridges' awful performance (one minute he's playing it straight, the next he's The Dude-- make up your mind and stick with one, willya?) to marvel at the sheer hateful lameness of this blatant sequel set-up.
There is so much more I could say about this waste of time, money, and opportunity, but I will end by saying that this film left my childhood memories like a Saturday night after Atilla the Hun hit town: raped and murdered.