“If you’ve seen one consumer electronics show, you’ve seen ‘em all.”

OK, that’s not a fair quote from the 1982 version of “Tron” to start an essay on its sequel, “Tron: Legacy.” For one thing, consumer electronics shows are usually far more coherent and organized, and they’re not dedicated to selling you cute human beings in nonsense situations, and at least you get to go home with some clever squishy promotional items instead of a feeling that you’re just watched a more than two-hour kids’ movie written around high-speed action and one-liners straight out of Introduction To Every Summer Blockbuster Trailer Ever 101: “Some things are worth the risk.” “Guess we’re supposed to change the world.” “Make it there alive, and he’ll find you.”

The original “Tron” was really good — all you needed to know was that wronged computer dude turned arcade owner Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) was trying to find out if his game ideas had been stolen when he was sucked into a world above his head and had to use all the wits he didn’t know he had to get out successful. Success, in his world, involves not killing someone he’s thrown into a video game to defeat. It involves controlling his reality with his mind. It involved all the redemption a kid in the 80s could want, back when you were ostracized as a neo-maxi zoom-dweebie for being into video games and computers. It involves a story that’s good enough even when your landscape is based on Pong.

But the “Tron” reboot fails to be Type 1 fun (fun while you’re having it) or even Type 2 fun (not fun to go through, but a fun experience in retrospect). It’s Type 3 fun, like clubbing, hyped up by all, and you’re certain it’ll at least be a good time, but in the end, no one enjoyed a second of it. Flynn’s all-grown-up, gotta-save-Dad son comes

off like a Coors-drinking (cough, product placement, cough) Ducati-riding (cough, sorry, this is a persistent cough) d-bag who lives in a million-dollar, secluded, dockside (?!) garage (??!!) and hasn’t — yet — killed a family with his swerving highway theatrics. There’s a fat, lazy security guard with his feet up and an angry,

generically foreign taxi-driver who tries to kill the son while screaming “no free ride!” And the old mainframe world has been turned into a not-quite-video-game, not-quite-foreign-planet world of smoke and screaming Superbowls where people in vinyl jackets and salad shooters on their heads die in blasts of tangerine confetti against a

hostile, volcanic, teal landscape and the women are all robot maids and soothing GPS voices. This is the future as masterminded by Biff Tannen’s Pleasure Paradise casino. I completely prefer the smooth, unapologetic, obvious look of the original virtual reality world. It was a look that was Dr. Caligari-like, and said, “Go stylized or go home.”

Maybe if you’re watching the thing on the big screen, immersed in 3D and not the cartoonish “Jurassic Park” sound library, the plot doesn’t seem to zig and zag like a lightcycle manned by a drunk driver, the expository connections from the original “Tron” to the real-life world of open source software and net neutrality don’t seem as clunky as an uncomfortable shoulderblade-mounted “identity disk,” and Flynn doesn’t seem like a semi-crazed religious zealot telling his kid about some nonsense utopia. Maybe it doesn’t sound like it aspires, and fails, to be those horrible “Star Wars” prequels.

You need a mindless, fun experience when you’re catering to an audience you plan to pitch both a 10-part TV series and an undecided amount of movie sequels. The new “Tron” doesn’t provoke any of the actual emotions I remember as a kid watching the clean, cold, space-meets-8-bit-Nintendo frontier of life and death and speed and

space, where good versus evil could play out on a grid, in a beam of light. The creators of the relaunch probably consider such a film a failure. Why get audiences invested in the main character’s survival and success when you can have them pull out their wallets for a “Tron” video game or a six-disc DVD set or a pair of cheap, plastic Identity Disk (batteries not included) for the kids to chuck at each other’s heads on rainy days? These days, that’s the only investment Disney appears to care about.

Ashley O’Dell writes about movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.