T2 Trainspotting (18)

four stars

Dir: Danny Boyle

With: Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Jonny Lee Miller

Runtime: 117 minutes

DANNY Boyle’s belter of a drama begins with a shot of people running. While fitting for a picture that made tearing down the street to Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life part of Scottish cultural history, it is also a sign of Boyle’s intention to not just wander down memory lane but to sprint, taking in all the old sights along the way.

His picture will pause here and there, like Renton over a car bonnet, to give the viewer a manic grin, or in one particular scene a dirty great laugh, but it will also halt you in its tracks with some unexpected poignancy. (Cue voice of Begbie in head: “Unexpected poignancy? Wit is this s****?”). Whatever it makes you feel, Boyle’s sequel to the 1996 film that lit a fire under notions of Scottish “cool” will not leave you unmoved. (Begbie again: “Gonnae ******* get oan wi this ******* review, doll?”).

It is 20 years on from the events which saw Mark/Renton (McGregor) doing the dirty on his pals after a drugs deal and fleeing abroad. Boyle and his screenwriter John Hodge, another old team reunited, quickly fill in what has been happening to our anti-heroes. Spud (Ewen Bremner) has been on and off drugs, Begbie (Robert Carlyle) is once more in touch with the forces of law and order, and Simon/Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) is making a living through some, er, film-making of his own (the Irvine Welsh novel on which the 18-certificate film is very loosely based is Porno).

“You’re looking well, Mark,” says Spud on meeting his second best friend (his first, he reckons, being drugs). “Everyone says that,” says Renton. As well they might. Renton, Begbie and Miller look like they have spent the intervening decades enjoying successful careers stateside, so sleek are their physiques. Funny that. Only poor old Spud is looking as tatty as his real life counterpart would be by now.

A new face is Anjela Nedyalkova, who plays Veronika, Simon’s Bulgarian girlfriend. It is her lot to introduce, with occasionally sledgehammer-like obviousness, tales and riffs of times past. There are a lot of these, including an update to the “choose life” speech. Good times are remembered, and some awful ones too. Indeed, there are enough nods in T2 to T1 to bring on a sore neck. Nor is the story going to win any awards for originality. Some might be disappointed by this, believing Boyle and Hodge should have been bolder, less reliant on what went before. But the audience wants to feel the warm sand of nostalgia between its toes, and Boyle handles the references with such verve and wit that one can easily forgive their ubiquitousness.

Moreover, the point of the first film, and this one, is that most people don’t change much, their lives start small and end small, an idea Boyle gets across with frequent flashbacks to the four one-time pals as boys. In these lives there are no miraculous turnarounds, no “journeys”, no character arcs, no redemption. This is Leith, not La La land, after all.

There are original pleasures to be had, though, such as a soundtrack so achingly cool it will give your ears ice burns, and the pin-sharp cinematography, with frequent Boyle collaborator Anthony Dod Mantle (Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours) proving a fitting successor to Brian Tufano in making auld Reekie look brand new. While the comedy can be disappointingly broad at times, there is one scene, set in a club where the patrons are of, let us say, a certain Trumpian persuasion, that is sheer genius.

Just as the first picture took the pulse of Scotland, so this one is on the money, showing it to be a place of shiny new things (a parliament for one) and people, but one still tied to its past. At heart this is a film about ghosts – ghosts of dreams and good intentions, ghosts of the boys these men once were – yet you will be hard pushed this year to find a film that has such a lust for life.