So we have Kevin Flynn as the lost father who now lives in The GRID and has become a contemplative yoga type individual who feels that sometimes doing nothing is best.  Then we have the young brash son, Sam Flynn, who is determined to find his father and bring him back from the cyber world into the real world of flesh and blood,  There's the bad guy, who is sworn to stop them both, but will eventually meet his just reward and there's the cute girl who is - well, a cute girl who does what all cute movie girls do.  In this film she's an ISO and Kevin Flynn's surrogate daughter.

Jeff Bridges plays Kevin Flynn, the father who somehow became digitized by a machine back in the 1980's and has been stuck in the GRID ever since.  Bridges also plays the bad guy CLU, an entity created by Kevin Flynn to help him against the Master Control Program who wanted to take over everything.  But CLU went rogue in his search for perfection and now is Flynn's nemesis.  In a remarkable digital coup, Bridges is made to look 30 years younger and you can bet that this technique is going to become more and more popular as trendy divas begin to show a few lines here and there.  Why spend a fortune on botox when a pimply geek can click a few mouse strokes and make one look 30 years old again?

The film is very dark and shadowy and there are spectacular motorcycle chases with some really cool looking digital bikes.   If hand to hand combat is your thing, you will have to settle for disk to disk combat as the warriors use a Frisbee like device that is hurled at the opponent  hoping to strike him just in the right spot and blow him to bits - literally bits - because they are all digital images.  This Identity Disk also doubles as a storage device to save every thing the entity does or learns.  In a furious clash, Flynn's disk is stolen and from then on the struggle for the retrieval of the disk becomes the focal point of the action.

If you like armies you will love the multitude of regiments that CLU creates.  The sum of the digital warriors rivals the film 3000, all to defeat three people.  In a colorful touch, the bad guys are all dressed in black  trimmed in orange stripes where electrons flow while the good guys are trimmed in white (what else?).  There are deep, steep drops for the bad guys to fall into and huge explosions when one of the good guys destroys an enemy.  Michael Sheen has a terrific scene where during an epic battle, he seems to be choreographing it a la Joel Gray's Cabaret in the End of Line Cafe.  Bruce Boxleitner is very warm and  sympathetic as the loyal friend in the real world who is determined to help young Sam recover his rightful place in ENCOM, a digital games empire founded by his father.