REVIEW - T2 TRAINSPOTTING (DANNY BOYLE)

The brazen, boisterous impulsivity of youth comes crawling back to the screen, wearied by age if not maturity. What lust for life remains may only be a lust for a life long since lived, the heady intensity of its highs and lows now supplanted by poignancy and regret for them. T2 Trainspotting arrives bang on time, the distance between it and its predecessor sufficient to meaningfully distinguish between the two - this film and 1996's Trainspotting exist in genuinely different times, and have genuinely different comments to make. There's perverse joy to be wrought out of a nostalgia trip into past perverse joys, though as organic as these sensations might be, and as faithfully depicted, they're inescapably muted. The real, substantial joys of T2 are in the perpetuation of that same energy that engendered those of old, and it's thus that the eternal innovator, Danny Boyle, spins a success out of a conceptually suspect sequel. He seeks to engender new highs and lows from cloth sourced from past, present and the furthest, dankest corners of warped imagination. There are overt nods to that nostalgia, though T2 goes through nostalgia altogether and out the other end, but everything about this film is overt, including the sheer, simple entertainment value it near-constantly insists on supplying. Boyle has always been an audience-attentive filmmaker, and always at his best when he has put their interests first. As ever before, this ramshackle construction falls apart so swiftly when provoked by plot necessity, and director and writer John Hodge alike yet again prove themselves apparently incapable of resolving any particular plot with any particular skill. But they've done the right work in the right places otherwise, and T2 is thus an exemplary follow-up to a bona fide classic, against all the odds.

FIRST TRAILER FOR T2: TRAINSPOTTING

The title sucks, meaning pretty fucking little apart from a probably-unwitting, entirely bizarre and entirely inapt homage to Terminator 2. But the trailer rocks, as does the film from which this 21-years-later sequel follows on. Trainspotting is precisely the kind of film whose sequel should be set this far in the future, rather than a few months down the road, and with Danny Boyle, John Hodge, the old cast members, and the new addition of Anthony Dod Mantle on cinematography, one's right to expect damn good things from T2: Trainspotting, if the above trailer and first proper look at the film is to be trusted. Out in the UK and Ireland on the 27th of January and in the US on the 3rd of March. Choose T2!