I finally got to see TRON Ares and I can honestly say I had no issues with it. But, I need to admit I wasn't a huge fan of TRON. I really did enjoy TRON Legacy. It was a shame they didn't continue that storyline.
Still TRON Ares isn't a horrible film, like the way most reviewers made it out to be. It was just a different story set in the world of TRON. Yes, the character of Tron doesn't appear in the story, but this is the story of Ares. It is the story of a program that was made to kill other programs and infiltrate files. As a side effect of his programming Ares starts to question his programming and gets an interest in the human world. Ares becomes basically human and he has a desire to stay in the human world and help the human he has befriended. You can see this difference when you compare him with his former second in command, Athena. Jared Leto does an excellent job bringing Ares to life. I really can't understand why people are so hard on him. He is a very competent actor. So, in my humble opinion I think fans were overly hard on this film because it didn't have Tron in it and had a short scene with a Kevin Fynn program, but I believe that the reviews under represented that scene. The Flynn program let Ares talk so it could evaluate his motives and see if he was worthy of getting the code that would allow him to stay in the human world. Ares showed him he cared and that he was more that a being enslaved to his program. He showed he had the potential to be more. Fynn saw this. The scene was not a waste of time. People just ignore what it was and why it was there.
All I can say is give TRON Ares a second chance and look at it as a separate thing to the Fynn legacy storyline.