CAPSULE: T2 Trainspotting (2017, Dir. Danny Boyle)

Draw a direct line through your childhood, through a misspent adolescence and through your adult life and the finger eventually traces its way back around to, or it snags on, the past. Something pulls from our more energetic days when mortgages, nine-to-fiving and business suits were little more than traps “grown-ups” had fallen into.

There’s no way you could miss how bone-deep director Danny Boyle understands this. Or John Hodge, Trainspotting’s writer. Or Irvine Welsh, the author of ‘Porno’, the sequel this sequel takes many of its cues from. Or Ewan McGregor. Or Jonny Lee Miller. Or Ewen Bremner. Or, heavens bless him for being back on the big screen, Robert Carlyle.

For all of them, and for the film itself, there’s a dispiriting longing for the past. There’s a debilitating eye to the future. And we’re left between the two staring down the sinkhole of the present. But, this being Danny Boyle (and Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie), ennui comes smothered in hi-NRG cine-literate audiovisual bombast. Talk about harking back to your salad days.

T2 Trainspotting finds Renton, having chewed through his post-heist life in Amsterdam, getting hit mid-workout by a cheeky infarction. His life flashes before our eyes (old photos and clips from Trainspotting) and within the space of a couple of rapid edits he’s back in Leith looking to reconcile with the friends he fucked over.

Life hasn’t been quite as kind to the others. Sick Boy’s running a pegging/blackmail scam with girlfriend Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova) and a coke habit that repeatedly undoes his dodgy get rich (not so) quick schemes. Spud’s back on the gear and struggling to hold it together with Gail (Shirley Henderson) and his son. Begbie’s locked up and still raging against, well, every fucking thing.

The affection comes in waves. This cast knows their roles as cultural touchstones well and Boyle is a consummate dealer. He makes this straining from effort look effortless. Staccato call-backs to retina burnt images bring on rushes like dope does e. Place two of these guys in a room together and the synapses fire. And like other properties that have been exhumed of late, it is hard not to feel a little played.

T2 does it knowingly though, and Boyle, Hodge and Welsh take it meta to the n-th degree (“The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy”). As Sickboy says, “It's just nostalgia! You're a tourist in your own youth.”

They are. We are.

The finger always traces back.

So we shout “lager, lager, lager!” again. We choose life again. We see Renton’s windscreened killer smile again. We see the sad shells we become thrown back in our faces.

And like addicts we only crave for more.

★★★☆

Trailer: