It’s been about twenty years, what have the lads from Trainspotting been up to? Much the same as before, only with less heroin, it would appear. T2 Trainspotting, the hit-and-miss but turbocharged sequel from all the original crew, is playing now.

My review is at Film Journal International:

The last we saw Renton (Ewan McGregor) in Trainspotting, that verve-and-nerve 1990s midpoint between Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie, he was absconding with several thousand pounds that he and his junkie mates had scored in a heroin deal. The first we see of him in the sequel, two decades on, he’s still running. But unlike the first film’s now-iconic dashes through the streets of Edinburgh, now Renton, the onetime rail-thin hedonist and Iggy Pop enthusiast, is on a treadmill. In a gym. It all seems to have gone intensely wrong for him even before he has a good percussive pratfall to start this pell-mell sequel…

Here’s the trailer: