In the last decade, Danny Boyle has become quite the sentimentalist. T2 Trainspotting is an exercise in nostalgia unlike any I’ve ever seen. The film is more successful as a run of fan-service vignettes designed to make people not only remember the pulse-pounding ferocity of the first Trainspotting in 1996, but of the 90’s itself. All of the primary cast returns. Ewan McGregor’s Mark Renton returns to Scotland after twenty years in Amsterdam hiding from the friends he robbed of sixteen thousand pounds. He meets ol’ Spud (Ewen Bremner), who has a son now, but is still a sweet, but doddering junkie. He even makes time for Sick Boy (Johnny Lee Miller), though he now goes by the more formal Simon. Simon works as an embezzler with a Bulgarian prostitute named Veronica (Anjela Nedyalkova), but upon seeing Mark for the first time in decades, he decides to embark on a new business venture, that might also give him the opportunity for some old fashioned vengeance as well. All the while, the frighteningly volatile Begbie (Robert Carlyle) escapes from prison just in time to meet his former friend turned sworn enemy, and hand out the kind of punishment only he is capable of.

T2 cannot stand on its own. Not only does the film not work if you haven’t seen Trainspotting, it will probably be quite a chore unless you loved Trainspotting. Now, I did love that film. I still find its scrambling, manic energy to be the peak of Danny Boyle’s fluid, but overall successful film career. John Hodge returns to pen the screenplay for T2, and like Trainspotting, there’s a lot of fun to be had in the kind of depraved, vile lifestyle of a heroin addict. T2 doesn’t have the cringe-worthy, barf-inducing abandon of the first film (no dead babies on the ceiling, no swimming in a diarrhea-infested toilet bowl), but it’s still pumping with an at least comparable vitality, a biting sense of humor, and the cast is down to partake in the kind of fun they got up to twenty years ago – though it’s hard not to watch McGregor and Miller and wonder if they’re a tad too old for this. Boyle is doing some pretty standard work here. He can be one of the more masterful filmmakers working today when things come together correctly, but with the wrong cast and screenplay, his movies can come across as starving for attention. T2 ends up somewhere in between. There are times when it feels equal to its predecessor, but in the end it seems forged by fan letters and a that aimless energy that comes with a movie that no one was really asking for.

 

Directed by Danny Boyle