‘Tron: Ares’: Jared Leto Brings Down An Already-Average, Visually Stunning Legacy Sequel

Even if its lead actor were not woefully miscast, Tron: Ares would already be a muddled headscratcher of a blockbuster legacy sequel with groanworthy nostalgia-baiting and musings about artificial intelligence that are, putting it nicely, strange for the current cultural moment. Yet its positive elements are undermined and its myriad flaws made clearer by one man that has the direct opposite of the Midas touch: Jared Leto.

Indeed, the third Tron movie is undermined at every turn by Leto, who’s seemingly made it his life goal in recent years to smoulder for the camera without ever doing much acting. Without so much as an iota of charisma held within him, Ares collapses with Leto as its helm; an extra shame when the visuals, excellent Nine Inch Nails score and other performers deserve a much better lead and script.

How’s this for a cinematic escape from reality: it’s 2025, and the CEOs of large companies are fighting to have a monopoly over AI. One is Eve Kim (Greta Lee), the more moral head of ENCOM, while the other is Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters) who creates the hyper-advanced program Ares (Leto) that’s capable of entering the real world through fabrication technology.

Ares is initially tasked with violently retrieving the Permanence Code, the key to allowing these digital creations to remain in the real world forever. But alas, Ares begins to disobey his creator and find out what it is to be ‘alive’ and carve his own path in the world.

As the main character – the opening scene of the film is his ‘birth’ – Ares is a character that would need to be portrayed by an actor capable of cold calculation and warm charisma in equal parts. Fascinatingly, Leto comes close to neither throughout Tron: Ares, barely convincing in his more villainous starting position and even less so when we’re supposed to emotionally invest in his character.

Tron: Ares would be at least passable without Jared Leto

Though the script for the film is hardly incredible with its musings on AI that would’ve been trite when the last Tron movie came out in 2010, it’s hard to overstate how much life Leto sucks out of this movie. He is completely lacking in any of the qualities needed from a leading man, and the movie is generally best when he’s not seen or heard from for an extended period.

He even brings down the rest of his castmates like the exceptional Greta Lee, who does as much as she, and Evan Peters as the exceptionally nervy Julian. Supporting cast members, like Jodie Turner-Smith as the cool-looking but flat Athena, simply can’t do much with their characters either.

All of these actors deserve a film more interested in making use of their talents, and it’s apparent that Joachim Rønning’s main priority was making Tron: Ares an audiovisual experience. On that metric, the film succeeds. With its sleek IMAX-first cinematography and genuinely incredible score by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Ares is nothing if not spectacular to look at and listen to.

But Tron: Ares is not a music video, even if it’s better when mimicking one. Compared to previous entries in this franchise, which have had similarly mixed results but nonetheless felt more passionately realised, it feels deeply artificial and confuses as regularly as it bores. Unlike AI-generated art, the latest entry in the Tron franchise is a visual feast; but just like it, Ares feels utterly soulless.

★★

Tron: Ares is in cinemas now.