Producers: Sean Bailey, Jared Leto, Emma Ludbrook, Jeffrey Silver, Justin Springer and Steven Lisberger   Director: Joachim Rønning   Screenplay: Jesse Wigutow   Cast: Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, Cameron Monaghan, Gillian Anderson and Jeff Bridges   Distributor: Disney

Grade: C-

Nostalgia can’t justify “Tron: Ares,” the third movie in the Disney franchise that began with the groundbreaking CGI showcase of 1982 and then went moribund until 2010, when the sequel “Tron: Legacy” was released.  Both films, about humans drawn into the digital Grid, a realm of virtual realities, as embodiments of the computer programs they’d created, were visually impressive but dramatically flat, little more than feature-length catenae of chases and battles.  (An animated TV series of 2012-13 proved a dud.)

What, beside the profit motive, possessed Disney to make another sequel after the passage of another decade and a half?  Certainly not the inane script, replete with characters so one-dimensional that they give cardboard a bad name and dialogue so clichéd that it’s hard to suppress a giggle while they’re spouting it.  Not to mention a plot that can justly be described as infantile.

It centers on the inevitable MacGuffin, a computer code devised by the legendary Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) that can extend the life of computer-generated things, be they people, trucks or trees, beyond a twenty-nine-minute span after they’re transplanted into the “real” world, at the close of which they crumble to dust.  The code has been hidden away for decades.

Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters, a talented actor reduced to playing a snarling comic-book villain here, the techno-dweeb with delusions of omnipotence) is the grandson of the evil guy played by David Warner in the original film.  He’s just succeeded his mother (Gillian Anderson, all prune-faced snootiness) as president of Dillinger Systems and is determined to secure this so-called Permanence Code.  His chief instrument is Ares (Jared Leto, impassive and dull, though appropriately smoldering in his shiny black-and-red body suit), the Master Control entity he controls in the Grid.

Julian’s in competition with Eve Kim (Greta Lee), the CEO of Flynn’s old employer ENCOM.  Grieving the death of her twin sister, Eve resumes her sibling’s search for the elusive code, an effort that takes her to an abandoned station in remote Alaska with her annoyingly snarky aide Seth (an obnoxious Arturo Castro).  Rifling through a box of old floppy discs, she finds the code.  But Julian learns of the discovery and sends Ares, his second-in-command Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith, buff but boringly fierce) and their cohort to retrieve the file, cuing the first of several protracted motorbike chases suffused with bands of red laser exhaust.

You know whom you’re meant to root for in this corporate fracas.  Eve, inheriting her sister’s do-gooder impulses, intends using the code to grow imperishable orange groves, apparently to supply endless doses of Vitamin C to all, while Julian’s goal is to cultivate a crop of super-soldiers. 

Eve destroys the file before Ares can take her prisoner and brought into the Grid, but when Julian learns that the code still lingers inside her, he orders Ares to extract it even if it means her death. That engages a sense of empathy in Ares and he goes rogue, escaping with Lee and helping her evade Julian’s army, now led by Athena.  In the ensuing action Ares, who’s somehow coming to have a human side (the script itself alludes to both Frankenstein and Pinocchio) makes a detour into the ancient area of the Grid (he calls it “classic”), where he converses with an aging Flynn.  During their talk he expresses a preference for Depeche Mode over Mozart, proving beyond any doubt his transformation is still in its infancy, but Flynn, whom Bridges gives a dudish Lebowski vibe, approves of the guy and his mission. 

There follows yet more massive destruction as Athena, who also escapes Julian’s control, wages unrestrained war on Kim, her corporate colleagues Seth and Ajay Singh (Hasan Minhaj), and, of course, Ares.  No points for predicting who comes out on top, but much bloodless carnage in the streets is necessary before the decision is reached; and even then an inter-credits scene suggests that the battle is not yet over—a scrappy survivor indicates a sequel may be in the offing.  One can only hope it will take another fifteen years to gestate.

Though “Ares” does neither its cast nor its audience any favors, it does allow an army of visual artists the opportunity to strut their stuff.  The team led by visual effects supervisor David Seager and production designer Darren Gilford have done a fine updating of the sleek look of the previous films, costume designers Alix Friedberg and Christine Bieselin Clark trot out tight spandex duds for the AI fighters, and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth decks it all out in a glossy package.  Unfortunately, Tyler Nelson’s editing allows many sequences—the cycle changes in particular—to run on too long (when one spends so much on effects it’s hard to jettison any of them), and the score by Nine Inch Nails (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) is, especially in the IMAX format, insanely loud, and compounded by an equally relentless sound design.  The result does, to be sure, have the benefit of drowning out some of the puerile dialogue, but it’s still mighty oppressive.

Disney and director Joachim Rønning have gone out of their way to satisfy devotees who turned the previous “Tron” movies into cult favorites, and as an exercise in fan service “Ares” fills the bill.  But by any objective standard it’s a supremely silly, if good-looking, hunk of cartoonish sci-fi.            

Producers: James Wan and Peter Safran   Director: Michael Chaves   Screenplay: Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick   Cast: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Mia Tomlinson, Ben Hardy, Rebecca Calder, Elliot Cowan, Kila Lord Cassidy, Beau Gadsdon, Molly Cartwright, John Brotherton, Steve Coulter, Shannon Kook, Peter Wight and Kate Fahy Distributor: Warner Bros.

Grade: C-

“Anything can happen, and it probably will.”  Those words are spoken by Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson) in the last act of this fourth movie in “The Conjuring” franchise (the ninth if you count the various spinoffs), but it might have been the mantra of Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, whose screenplay for “Last Rites,” as it’s subtitled, is so loaded down with horror-movie tropes that eventually the movie collapses under the weight.  Simply put, it turns a rather simple haunted-house story into something that’s overloaded, overwrought and overlong.  And to make matters worse, the result isn’t remotely scary.      

The script is based on a well-known haunting that supposedly plagued the Smurl family in suburban Pennsylvania in the seventies and eighties.  The incident was, in fact, the subject of not just news reporting, but a 1991 TV movie, “The Haunted,” in which the Warrens (a solemn Stephen Markle and Diane Baker) played a supporting role.  Even by the standards of the time, it was a sober account of the affair, seemingly “accurate” in terms of presenting things from the Smurls’ perspective.  It was, as a result, rather dull in a post-“Exorcist” age.

“Sober” is a word that could hardly be used to describe “Rites,” which has recentered the story on the Warrens, not just Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) and Ed (Patrick Wilson) but their daughter Judy (Mia Tomlinson) and her fiancé Tony Spera (Ben Hardy).  It begins with a flashback to the couple’s first case back in the mid-sixties involving a cursed, full-sized mirror that so terrifies them that they run away from it.  The experience affects Lorraine’s pregnancy, and her delivery is difficult, with the baby girl stillborn for a full minute before springing to life.

Two decades later, Judy has inherited her mother’s clairvoyant ability and intuits the turmoil in the Smurl household—apparitions, creepy dolls, poltergeist intrusions, levitations, etc.—that can be traced to that cursed mirror, which Grandpa and Gramma Smurl (Peter Wight and Kate Fahy) have bought for the Smurl girls (Kila Lord Cassidy, Beau Gadsdon and Molly Cartwright).  When the kids try to throw it out, it extracts a terrible vengeance on one of them even as it’s demolished in a garbage truck.  And, of course, it returns from the debris to somehow take up residence in the attic.

Despite the pleas of devout Catholics Jack (Elliot Cowan) and Janet (Rebecca Calder), the church does little to help their family until Father Gordon (Steve Coulter), the Warrens’ long-time clerical confidante, intervenes.  The Warrens decline to get involved, citing their exhaustion from the demonology business—their only participation now is delivering sparsely-attended lectures to incredulous college kids—and their emphasis on their home life, with entirely too much of the running-time devoted to Ed’s semi-grumpy “Father of the Bride” attitude toward the suitor seeking his blessing to wed his little girl.  But when the good reverend himself goes to the Smurls and then is murdered, Judy’s intuition kicks in, and it’s her decision to get involved that draws her parents and her groom-to-be to the Smurl home as well.

It’s not the fact that the actual Judy Warren never played a part in her parents’ paranormal adventures that’s irritating about all this; after all, the series has never claimed even the vestiges of a documentary.  The problem, from a narrative perspective, is that when Gordon, and then the Warrens, show up at the Smurl house, “Last Rites” goes full bore into a barrage of horror-movie tropes so insistent and overwhelming that the movie turns into self-parody, throwing in everything but the kitchen sink.  (My apologies: at one point Lorraine’s garbage disposal backs up and spews out a torrent of blood that makes you think it was a cousin of the elevator in the Overlook Hotel.)

Anyway, we get innumerable shots of people walking through dark rooms alone, flashlight in hand; sudden appearances by spectral figures, always accompanied by the shattering crash of Benjamin Wallfisch’s score in the usual jump-scare fashion; other ghostly apparitions, including a hulking farmer with a malevolent grin and an axe poised to strike; dolls that become animated and assume the guise of menaces; and an unfinished attic floor that threatens to collapse as heroes bearing that heavy, cursed mirror try to traverse it over slender wooden beams set down as a path.  There’s even the worst horror imaginable: a car that won’t start when it’s needed.

The avalanche of such stuff is meant to ratchet up the fear quotient—Wallfisch’s pounding music certainly indicates as much—but it’s more likely to provoke giggles than screams, especially since editors Gregory Plotkin and Elliot Greenberg have trouble keeping the various elements even vaguely coherent in the muddle; the result feels like several episodes of “Supernatural” mashed up in a blender that’s slightly off-kilter—which might not matter if it were genuinely frightening.  But despite all the hubbub “Last Rites” turns out to be as boring as “The Haunted” was back in 1991.

Along the way there’s some attempt to explain what’s happening.  Lorraine points to a demon acting through the mirror that has awakened the spirits of a troubled family that once lived on the land on which the Smurl house was built and forcing them do its bidding; the purpose is apparently to lure the Warrens back into the battle they once abandoned.  (In this Warren-centered scenario the Smurls are just unfortunate collateral damage.)  But the demon can apparently wander about on its own well outside the house, too; it invades the store where Judy is trying on her wedding dress, which allows for one of those multiple-mirror mazelike sequences that directors love, as well as the diocesan office where Father Gordon is murdered with the help of a floor buffer.

The movie does have some strengths, of course.  Farmiga and Wilson try to add some nuance to their aging investigators, with the latter accentuating references to Ed’s heart problems and the former his wife’s concern about his wellbeing.  (The lecture scene in which derisive students use “Ghostbusters” to ridicule them justifies their world-weary withdrawal from their work, too.)  Tomlinson actually does much of the heavy lifting here and manages well enough, though the character is often portrayed as out of her depth; and Hardy makes a pleasantly supportive partner for her.  Of the supporting cast only Coulter manages to make much of an impression; despite getting a good deal of running-time, the Smurls emerge as a bland bunch as their story is pretty much shunted to the background in favor of emphasis on the Warrens.  On the technical side, production designer John Frankish has provided appropriately gloomy settings, handsomely festooned with period detail (notice the programs featured on the TV sets), and Eli Born’s cinematography ably contrasts the sitcomish colors of the Warren household in the early going with the darkly burnished atmosphere of the Smurl home in the final act.

“Last Rites” is being advertised as the last installment of the “Conjuring” series, but at its close Ed takes Tony on a tour of the locked chamber in the Warren home where they’ve stashed all the cursed and satanic objects they’ve collected over the years.  He tosses the key to his son-in-law-to-be and says, “Welcome to the family business.”  The words might elicit a subdued “Uh-oh” from viewers. Even without any claim to clairvoyance, one can sense a hint of a prospective next-generation spin-off in the minds of producers Wan and Safran.