Trainspotting 2 (R16)

117 mins

They should have called it T2: The Reckoning. Twenty years after Mark Renton decamped from a London hotel room with £16,000 in drug money, he returns to Edinburgh and is forced to reconcile with his old friends and the failure to make much of his life in between. Finding Spud and Sick Boy have not so much moved on as slipped down, the lads grapple with past betrayals, present financial opportunities and the ghost of Francis Begbie Future.

Director Danny Boyle shot to fame on the back of 1996’s Trainspotting ,as did his cast of fearless young men (and Kelly Macdonald), some of whom went on to become Ewan ‘‘Obi-wan’’ McGregor and Jonny Lee ‘‘Holmes’’ Miller. During the intervening decades, Boyle and McGregor fell out over a casting decision (The Beach), Miller divorced Angelina Jolie, and the possibility of a Trainspotting sequel was mooted, and then discarded. Unless he could get the entire band back together, Boyle said, he wasn’t interested.

Well, the band is now back, along with novelist Irvine Welsh’s lilting Scottish prose and his cameo as drug dealer Mikey Forrester, and a whole lot of delight-bringing call-backs to the seminal 90s movie which ensured every viewer would say no to drugs – at least, the hard ones.

Acknowledging the poisoned chalice he was pouring, Boyle evidently listened to the focus groups whose priorities revolved around the resumption of the original cast and a pumping soundtrack, and has produced that most tricky of sequels: a story relevant to 2017, issues resonant for an audience who may also harbour regrets about the last two decades, and Boyle’s trademark panache built from a cacophony of visual and musical styles, the constant use of Dutch-tilt camera shots, and foul language.

It’s a much more mature film than its predecessor, as you’d hope (since watching a bunch of junkies 20 years on would be nothing short of depressing), and desperately, unashamedly nostalgic. Much of the personal interaction between Mark, Murphy, Simon and Franco (yes, they now call each other by their given names) feels, if not exactly heartfelt, at least warmly familiar and strangely comforting for the millions of viewers who nurse fond memories of the lads’ hilarious and horrific mishaps. Unusually, we are now treated to several flashbacks to childhoods we’ve never imagined them having and backstories that finally answer that unspoken 20-year old question: Why are these guys friends?

Although it purports to be a standalone film (and uses moments of slightly clunky exposition to help new viewers along), this isn’t a film for the millennials – T2i s firmly rooted in its legend and relies heavily on your attachment to the original in order to hook you to this one. And even though you know this is what’s happening, it feels so good you will find yourself going willingly for another hit. - Sarah Watt