‘T2 Trainspotting’ Review: Danny Boyle Gets the Band Back Together

How do you follow a cult success that defined the zeitgeist for a generation of film lovers, music fans and (recreational) drug users?

The lead character Mark Renton, played once again by a boyish-looking Ewan McGregor, utters these words during a litany of what he considers the modern world’s ills, many of which include social media (nothing dates a movie as awfully as words like “Snapchat” and “Twitter”), and you can’t help viscerally feeling that very disappointment, which is the film’s dominant theme.

Begbie (Robert Carlyle) remains in an Edinburgh prison, Simon “Sickboy” Williamson (Jonny Lee Miller) has graduated to blackmailing local dignitaries with the help of pretty Bulgarian sex worker Veronika (impressive newcomer Anjela Nedyalkova), and “Spud” Murphy (Ewen Bremner) is still a junkie, his life ruined by not being able to cope with clocks going forward an hour in summertime: “How was I supposed to know it was summer? I was still wearing a jumper …”

Returning screenwriter John Hodge, working vaguely from executive producer Irvine Welsh’s original novel and its 2002 disappointing follow-up “Porno,” supplies a bitter strain of humor but channels it more into great gulps of regret.

For Renton, it’s about going home; for Begbie, it’s about revenge; for Sickboy, it’s about being stuck in your aunt’s old pub in a city hooked on ’80s nostalgia nights while European subsidies and waves of gentrification obliterate the past.

[...] while the first film somehow captured, defined and shaped the mid-90s zeitgeist of Brit-pop and dance culture, of New Labour and a new wave of British cinema, you can’t help feel that “T2 Trainspotting” misses any such opportunity, particularly as it was shooting during the Brexit vote and now appears on the eve of Donald Trump marching into the White House.