“Tron: Ares” is a shiny, shambolic bauble, a film of CGI red neon streaks that no longer obsesses about taking us inside the electronic video game metaverse, but with bringing the grim, unemotional and “programmed” ethos of the electronic ether into a real world run by heartless, emotionally stunted and utterly unaccountable oligarchs.

Why director Joachim Rønning didn’t give the villains South African accents is its central mystery.

Disney puts the franchise in the hands of the director of a later, lesser “Pirates of the Caribbean” installment and “Maleficent” sequel and the screenwriter of TV’s “Daredevil” and some truly awfully scripted films (“It Runs in the Family,” “The Prince”), gave them $170 million+, and this is what they gave us.

This “Tron” is a dry, disorganized and empty viewing experience whose digital universe idea of “Ares,” a combat-ready Master Program named for the mythic God of War, is Jared Leto in brooding beardo mode.

The stakes should feel the highest of any of the films in the series — giant corporations “battle…for control of the future.” It’s reduced to the lawless/ruthlessness of yet another limited little man (Evan Peters) with dreams of megalomania and global dominance.

The characters and plot of “Tron: Legacy” (2010) are dispensed with in a news coverage montage in the opening credits. These days, the legacy of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) is in the hands of a surviving sister (Greta Lee) of the duo that ran the ENCOM empire that Flynn built from a video game store/startup in the ’80s.

“Flynn Lives!” remains the company’s motto as it battles Dillinger Corp, run by heir Julian (Peters) under the disapproving eye of his mother (Gillian Anderson).

The quest these days is for a “permanence code,” a form of digital immortality in the electronic universe that Flynn first visited and disappeared into while the rest of the world was sure he’d died.

Dillinger is offering the U.S. military digital soldiers generated in that world but easily matter-transferred to ours. Ares (Leto) and Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith, fierce and focused) are two top tier programs among the “expendable” digitally-created footsoldiers who can be summoned to battle in digital-to-real Tron tanks, upgraded Light Cycles, Recognizers (those Lego-looking U-shaped patrol craft) and digital jetbikes which can tear through the watery canals of the Tron-world.

Eve Kim has cracked the “permanence” code. Julian Dillinger wants it. And when he sends Ares to grab it from the returned-from-reclusive-mourning Kim, he shows just how far he’ll go to achieve his goal.

But Ares? He’s a computerized foot soldier who isn’t about to kill a human over this. No, that’s not logical. But why would you give your god of war warrior a beard with no Tron-verse barbershops to trim it?

Chases and digital, death-dealing (“deresolution” is a defeated game character’s fate) triangular boomerangs and lance fights, explosions and light cycle red streaks invade our world as Julian battles to punish Ares, abduct or kill Kim and get his mother to stop slapping him.

Back in 1982, “Tron” felt like the fun present talking to the dark future. “Tron Legacy” reached back to the past to speak to that same menacing future. “Tron: Ares” plays as the present talking about the unpleasant present.

But that’s a conversation this movie leaves hanging at every turn.

Bridges returns as the mythic Flynn, cashing a fat check (one hopes), robed and speaking in the ethereal netherwords of his character in those vapid young adult “Giver” movies.

In the end, whoever is foiled and whatever is “achieved,” all we’re sure of is the possibility of setting up a fourth film, which judging by the early box office take of this one, is no sure thing.

Director Rønning and Co. ignored Hitchcock’s edit that “Good villains make good thrillers. “Tron” had David Warner. “Legacy” had a digitally twisted younger version of Bridges. And “Ares” has Quicksilver from the latter X-Men movies.

Anderson would have made a better heavy. But that doesn’t fix the bland, chemistry-free leads Leto and Lee, of “Past Lives” and miscast here. Throwing in unamusing archetypal sidekicks (Arturo Castro, Hasan Minhaj) with little to say and whose only purpose was representation didn’t help.

The sad truth of the matter is that Disney took 15 years to make a sequel and never came up with a compelling story for that sequel to tell, and spent all that money without casting anybody who’d hold our interest dashing through all this red-neon nothingness for two hours.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Jodie Turner-Smith, Evan Peters, Arturo Castro, Hasan Minhaj, Gillian Anderson and Jeff Bridges

Credits: Directed by
Joachim Rønning, scripted by Jesse Wigutow, based on Steven Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird. A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 1:59