Throughout Danny Boyle's belated disinterment of the film that made his career, we hear infuriatingly brief tastes of the original project's most famous music cues. A beefy remix of Iggy Pop's Lust for Life appears right at the top. Smidgens of Underworld's Born Slippy pepper the succeeding action. The most pointed teaser comes when Mark Renton, still played by Ewan McGregor, lowers the stylus on a vinyl copy of the Iggy LP. We hear three beats before he lifts the arm again.
Those aural choices communicate much about the intentions and limitations of T2 Trainspotting (selecting the title must have taken at least 30 seconds). John Hodge's script, loosely adapted from Irvine Welsh's Porno, owns up to its own longing for the past.
"Nostalgia, that's why you're here. You're a tourist in your own youth," Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) says. We are also here for narcissism. Despite being set 20 years after the first film, T2 is as much about the creation of Trainspotting as Rogue One was about the origins of Star Wars. A fictionalised version of the original novel's genesis gradually edges its way into the story. The end becomes the beginning.
More worryingly, those tantalising musical snatches emphasise that we're watching a film that just can't get itself started. T2 is beautifully made and very well acted. Anthony Dod Mantle's cinematography allows stray light sources to eerily disturb its oily surface. Boyle continues to twist space in interesting ways.
Miller is both damaged and defiant as the older, more uncertain Sick Boy. Ewen Bremner reminds us that, gormless as he seems, Spud remains the misused moral core of the wasted posse. For all that, the script is hopelessly light on narrative momentum.
We begin with Renton returning to Edinburgh after suffering a cardiac incident in Amsterdam. Of the gang, he has come closest to "choosing" all the supposedly bourgeois horrors in the famous "choose life" monologue from Trainspotting. Spud hasn't quite escaped heroin. Sick Boy is running a blackmail operation from his auntie's faded pub. Begbie (Robert Carlyle) is planning his escape from prison. There's something about a scheme to set up a brothel in the pub. There's a subplot concerning Begbie's straight-edged son. Renton needs to make friends with his dad.
This higgledy patchwork exists to contain random nods to the modern Scotland (rather than selling drugs, the gang now apply for endangered EU grants), discrete comic interludes (the scene in a loyalist bar is genuinely hilarious) and pondering the effects of aging (though they all seem pretty smooth of cheek).
More than anything else, however, Trainspotting 2 is concerned with remixing the first part's original beats. Heroin is eventually taken because it wouldn't be a Trainspotting film without that drug. This year's "choose life" speech works in uncertain territory between sincerity and self-parody. "Choose Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and hope that someone, somewhere cares." Really? Is Renton supposed to sound like an angry middle-aged golfer writing to the Daily Mail? Look at these young people poking around with their metal Mickies. They want to get out and kick a ball around.
When the soundtrack does break away from its predecessor, it does so with similarly unadventurous results. It is delightful to hear The Rubberbandits' terrific Dad's Best Friend, but the filmmakers do nothing more than screen the video on Sick Boy's telly. Elsewhere, we get extended sequences to Dreaming by Blondie and Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. They're both good songs. But their inclusion does nothing to dispel the sense of weary familiarity that hangs over Boyle's film. Did Vera Lynn not allow them to use We'll Meet Again?
Despite its exhausting focus on the rear-view mirror, T2 just about gets by on technical pizzazz and spirited performances. It does not compare with a top-flight delayed sequel such as Before Sunset. But few will be mean enough to include it with such forgotten reprises as Gregory's Two Girls or Blues Brothers 2000. That will do to be going on with.
