Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) finds himself in a life-and-death light-cycle race in Disney's TRON: Legacy. (Disney Enterprises)

It's not every 60-year-old man who gets to stand face to face with his 32-year-old self. But in TRON: Legacy, the belated sequel to Disney’s 1982 film TRON, actor Jeff Bridges finds himself battling… well, Jeff Bridges, as he looked in the original movie. Thanks to the same digital wizardry that wizened Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Bridges is able to appear onscreen as both his older and younger self simultaneously.

You feel as if TRON: Legacy, like its predecessor, is straining to make itself into another Star Wars, but it lacks the scope of George Lucas’s imagination.

The elder Bridges – bearded, laidback – reprises his role as maverick computer programmer Kevin Flynn. As fans of the first film will recall, Flynn designed a program called CLU that looked identical to him. CLU resurfaces in the sequel, still resembling the thirtysomething Flynn. This virtual facelift (like many a real one) has a slightly waxy and unnatural appearance. Still, the amusing sight of the grizzled latter-day Bridges confronting the boyish Jeff of the ’80s – Crazy Heart’s Bad Blake seeing Starman in the mirror, as it were – is among the few touches of whimsy in this slick but uninspired action flick.

In the original TRON, you'll recall, Flynn got sucked into an evil cyberworld where he was forced to compete, gladiator-style, in life-or-death arcade games. Although he toppled the evil empire and escaped, that wasn’t the end of it. The prologue to TRON: Legacy tells us that, seven years later, Flynn – on the verge of making a groundbreaking scientific discovery – unaccountably disappeared.

Go ahead and guess where he ended up.

Flash forward two decades and we find his adult son, Sam (the charisma-free Garrett Hedlund), dealing with major abandonment issues while emulating his old man’s rebellious ways. That is, until a mysterious pager message leads him to his dad’s secret lab, whereupon Sam, like his father before him, is laser-vacuumed into cyberspace.

There, he discovers that a new evil empire has arisen, ruled by Flynn's CLU program, which has gone rogue. Flynn himself lives in impotent exile, doing his self-described “zen thing” in a safe house that looks like a Hollywood producer's pad, while CLU turns his ex-master’s virtual utopia into a militaristic autocracy.

Novice director Joseph Kosinski sees to it that all the iconic aspects of TRON are revived, but with the benefit of today’s more sophisticated computer animation and de rigueur 3D. Production designer Darren Gilford and his team do a loving upgrade of the backlit, electric circuitry-delineated cyberscape created for the initial movie. The light cycles, Solar Sailer, Recognizer, even those Frisbee-like discs, are all here in a more complex and impressive form. Kosinski uses them to recreate memorable scenes like the light-cycle race on the glowing Grid, which is a whole lot wilder and more visceral than it was in 1982.

Bruce Boxleitner, Bridges’s TRON co-star, is back as fellow computer genius Alan Bradley, whose own TRON program gives the movies their name. The new actors, meanwhile, conform to the first film’s template. We have Hedlund’s Sam as the smart-aleck rebel, Olivia Wilde (rocking a Louise Brooks look) as Flynn’s program protégée and Michael Sheen as the obligatory British baddie.

Playing Castor, the oily MC of a trendy cyber-club (where the DJs are the film’s composers, Daft Punk), Sheen delivers the picture’s liveliest performance. Coming on like the slippery spawn of Culture Club's Boy George and Cabaret’s Joel Grey, he injects a welcome dose of camp into the bland proceedings.

The film could use more comic energy like that, and less computer/fantasy geekiness. Screenwriters Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, like a couple of obsessed fanboys, get so caught up in explaining the movie’s imaginary world that they forget to write half-decent dialogue. Old pro Bridges comes off fine, simply by projecting his own chilled-out aura. (He’s basically playing The Dude as a father figure.) The younger cast members, however, barely make an impression. This computer world may be a three-dimensional wonder, but their personalities are as flat as a monitor.

True, there wasn’t a lot to the characterizations in the 1982 TRON. But we didn’t mind because the film’s visual creativity – one of the first forays into computer animation – was so much fun. Today, the work of director Steven Lisberger and his animators looks as elementary and quaint as a game of Asteroids, but it also has a gee-whiz charm.

While more dazzling to watch, TRON: Legacy has lost that innocent appeal. It’s burdened by the portentousness that has infected comic book- and video game-inspired movies in the last two decades. It’s no longer enough to entertain us with a cinematic arcade game – there also has to be serious, sentimental stuff about fathers and sons, passing the torch and all that.

You feel as if TRON: Legacy, like its predecessor, is straining to make itself into another Star Wars, but it lacks the scope of George Lucas’s imagination. And it doesn't lend itself to ongoing sequels.

The computerized rejuvenation of Bridges, on the other hand, kicks open the door for all kinds of vanity projects in Hollywood. Expect to see a slew of other aging movie stars line up for a digital nip and tuck.

TRON: Legacy opens Dec. 17.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.