A sequel was never going to live up to the hedonistic original, writes Alistair Harkness

It’s easy to both underand overestimate the importance of the original Trainspotting. Its stars all went on to healthy careers in movies and television; director Danny Boyle went on to win an Oscar and oversee the opening of the London Olympics, and the film itself – its dark wit, crazed energy and hallucinogenic flourishes (inspired by Irvine Welsh’s subsequent short story collection The Acid House) – caught the hedonistic mood of the mid1990s so perfectly it became one of the most successful independent Brit movies of all time.

Its impact on British and Scottish cinema has often been compared to punk for that very reason, but Trainspotting was more of an anomaly than the start of a movement.

A year or so later, British cinema found a more easily copied formula for success in The Full Monty and the film’s edginess gave rise not to riskier mainstream cinema, but to Guy Ritchie, whose flashy Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels rode the irksome Cool Britannia wave into the ground. Even in Scotland, it failed to wipe out the tartan clichés. Last year’s creaky Edinburgh International Film Festival opened with a movie about the birth of professional golf and closed with a rubbish remake of Whisky Galore at the very moment Boyle and co were shooting the sequel in the city. T2 couldn’t come soon enough.

Or could it? The best that can be said about the new