Director: Danny Boyle
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
Twenty years have passed in the lives of audiences and characters alike
in this long-awaited sequel to one of the defining films of the mid 90s.
As a result of its absence it necessarily has to contend with being
bathed in a pervasive but far from fatal dose of self-nostalgia, not for
Cool Britannia or anything so fleeting, but a deep, aching melancholy that
makes Trainspotting 2 as poignant as it is funny and exciting.
Friendship and betrayal are the key setup elements, as Mark
Renton (Ewan McGregor) returns to an Edinburgh that's changed a great deal
in the 20 years he’s been away since stealing the proceeds of a drug deal
from his friends.
Those friends haven’t changed much – Sick Boy (Johnny Lee Miller) is still
a pimp, Spud (Ewen Bremner) is still struggling with addiction and Begbie
(Robert Carlyle), still a psycho, is in jail. But Mark’s return sets them on a collision
course as they decide whether to choose the future or the past.
Does the “choose life” monologue feel a bit strained? Perhaps, but that
doesn't prevent it being one of the film’s highlights, neatly encapsulating lives
unlived or unfulfilled while sending up the mundanity and hopelessness the rest
of us are mired in.
Like the first film, it suffers slightly when a plot is forced to kick
in, and while Begbie hunting down Mark certainly provides meaningful threat and
no shortage of thrills and entertainment, the Terminator antics (where it
really lives up to its T2 moniker) are a little hard to swallow.
Yet it’s just one of a number of set pieces constructed with mastery by
Danny Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge that combine moments of hilarity and
horror with a hit of pure cinema, blessed once again with a cracking
soundtrack and visuals that are both innovative and able to show off
Edinburgh at its finest.
Enormously entertaining, thematically rich and hugely satisfying, it’s
hard to imagine how a better job could have been made of T2.