'Carlyle’s performance oozes traditional physical masculinity that creates a tragic gulf of communication when he meets his reserved teenage son'TriStar Pictures

“Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin.” These words get to the core of the original Trainspotting, as it turned 90s cinema on its head portraying the drug-addled underbelly of late-20th-century Edinburgh. Danny Boyle created a critically acclaimed film that touched the soul of a disillusioned generation, delving into the mentality of young heroin addicts using drugs to escape mainstream society. Set 20 years later, we return in T2 to find Renton, Begbie, Sick Boy and Spud still struggling to find a purpose in life. Drugs, however, are only one part of the story. There was always a sense of youthful exuberance amid the bleakness of Trainspotting, their addiction and criminality a temporary stage in their lives with Renton drawing a close on it at the end of Trainspotting. Presenting middle-aged men as still wedded to the same vices gives T2 a very different, but equally meaningful, sense of tragedy as the original: four lives wasted in the modern age.

Nostalgia is inherent in T2. But Boyle subverts the viewer’s own nostalgia, embarking on a haunting exploration of the consequences of ageing. As Sick Boy says, they’re “tourists in our own youth”. McGregor and Miller embody this nostalgic refrain with stellar performances. McGregor’s Renton is a wonderful contradiction. His physical appearance is of outward success, yet he is filled with uncertainty – his ‘success’ masking deeper emotional trauma. Sick Boy is a deeply tortured character, completely married to drugs and crime. Miller is a brooding presence throughout, with reserved ambivalence yielding to periodic waves of irrepressible anger. In one notable drinking scene, Boyle crafts a gloriously psychedelic image of youthful regression between the two men, as scenes from the past merge riotously with the present. Table football morphs into them reliving sporting moments of their childhood, symbolising two men mourning an ideal of their friendship lost in time.

Trainspotting's youthful ideology becomes a whisper, Renton’s repressed anger at the modern age hidden by his new, ‘wiser’ self.”

T2 is filled with nuanced images of masculinity – a rarity considering contemporary cinema’s obsession with burly heroic types. This is embodied by Robert Carlyle’s performance as Begbie. He reignites the deadpan black humour that defined his role in Trainspotting – watch out for a hilariously macabre jail scene involving a ‘targeted’ injury. This humour, like the film itself, is balanced against a deep sadness around his character. He is stuck in a imprisoning spiral and out for revenge against Renton. Carlyle’s performance oozes traditional physical masculinity that creates a tragic gulf of communication when he meets his reserved teenage son. The subtle anxiety Carlyle hints at in response to his child’s differentness builds a horrible sense of dislocation: a relic of a different age struggling to find an identity outside criminality.

Visually, T2 blends old and new in a poetic fashion. The iconic shot of Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Tommy at the Corrour railway station in the Highlands returns. Recreating the same image of the group places the loss of Danny in Trainspotting in stark relief. We are thrust into the heart of men still grieving the choices of their youth. These throwbacks of old are almost corrupted by the images of decay that permeate the film. Stark shots of Sick Boy’s pub surrounded by a graveyard of condemned tower blocks strengthen the sense of separation around these men – cast adrift in the rush to build a uniform modern world. Indeed, this brutalist imagery provides a stunning backdrop for the film’s final act, with the use of lens flare juxtaposed to bleak, wrecked surroundings evoking Boyle’s mastery of horror in the years since Trainspotting.

T2 is a stunning example of how to get a sequel right. References to the original abound without ever making it into too self-referential a picture. McGregor’s immortal “choose…” lines burst forth, updated for the 21st century, and retreat just as quickly. The youthful ideology of Trainspotting becomes a whisper, Renton’s repressed anger at the modern age hidden by his new, ‘wiser’ self. Viewers should not come to T2 expecting something completely different. It retains the original’s problem of relegating women to the background. For T2, however, this is an unfortunate sacrifice in a film whose beating heart is tortured masculinity: a tragic tale of four men lacking purpose in modern life.

Choose T2 Trainspotting. Choose Danny Boyle. Choose Scotland. Choose nostalgia, an energetic soundtrack, and trippy visuals. Choose a wide-eyed Ewen Bremner engaging with a tortured Jonny Lee Miller, retreating in awe from Robert Carlyle, and trying to forget Ewan McGregor became a Jedi since the last one. Choose literally anything else in the world over reading another mediocre reviewer capitalising on a genre-defining piece of scriptwriting to try and make their own writing seem more original. Choose passing over the irony in that sentence. Choose a sequel that lives up to the hype. Choose T2 Trainspotting.