Unlike original, not addictive
I’LL say this about heroin addicts: They generally don’t hang around boring you in middle age. Yet “T2 Trainspotting,” in which all five of the principals from 1996’s “Trainspotting” are miraculously still alive, is like a pathetic class reunion with the lads from Heroin U, an entire movie of “Remember that time we...?” Yes, we remember one of the best movies of the 1990s, but the sequel is like that moment at the party when someone raises the shades and you realize that it’s broad daylight, and well past time to go home.
We begin, as the first film did, with Renton (Ewan McGregor) running — but this time he’s on a treadmill. It’s a witty suggestion that middle age is life from the wrong end of the telescope, but it turns out to be merely the first of at least six increasingly lame references to that dizzying opening scene from “Trainspotting” and its sharply skewed “Choose life . . . I chose somethin’ else” monologue.
Perpetually angry Begbie (Robert Carlyle) — who was robbed along with fellow addicts Spud (Ewen Bremner) and Simon( aka Sick Boy, Jonny Lee Miller) at the end of the film by Renton, who took drug money that was supposed to be split four ways — escapes from prison and tries, incompetently, to rebuild a relationship with his wife and college-student son (Scot Greenan).
Meanwhile, Renton returns to Edinburgh from Amsterdam to make amends with Simon, a professional blackmailer who uses his hooker girlfriend (Anjela Nedyalkova) to catch johns in compromising positions. Spud, on the brink of suicide, turns to a writing career and emerges as the author of the stories presented in the first movie.
It isn’t till Begbie randomly learns that Renton is back in town that this choo-choo begins to chug forward, and although there is an amusing chase scene, and director Danny Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle make the low life glitter like a jewelbox, “T2” is utterly bereft of ideas about aging, taking responsibility or the virtues of a life more ordinary.
Boyle instinctively resists any temptation to moralize about the horrible choices this lot has made — but where does that leave him? Running everyone through similar (but sadder) high jinks, staging a roadshow version of the first movie, even desperately replaying clips and musical cues from it. Twenty-one years later, Renton & Co. are cooking up leftovers.