Trainspotting 2: Why choosing nostalgia wasn't the best idea for this sequel

In many ways, the original Trainspotting is a perfect film. Like a great debut album, it zips along on a wave youthful vigour. It’s hard not to be wowed by the sheer velocity of it. Watch it back today, and you’ll find not one frame is wasted. Every second propels the story forward. Or makes you laugh. Or makes you care. Or breaks your heart. Add to that a young cast and director all at their dazzling best, a fantastic soundtrack and the fact that, despite its grizzly subject matter, it managed to capture the heady optimism of the time, and you’ve got quite a potent cocktail. Which begs the question, how do you follow up a perfect film? With an imperfect one it seems.

T2 Trainspotting, (or T2), picks up on the gang 20 years later. Renton is back in Edinburgh after a 20-year exile in Amsterdam. The last time we saw Mark he’d just swindled his pals out of £4,000 each (minus Spud who he kindly compensated). In the two decades since, he's imposed a policy of zero contact with his childhood friends (wise, knowing the temperament of some of them) and has avoided Scotland to the point where he missed his own mother's funeral. But, as his life disintegrates in The Dam, the allure of returning to Leith becomes oddly appealing to the newly gym-addicted Renton.

Sick Boy is running his auntie's pub, plus a few scams with his Bulgarian girlfriend, and living in the grip of a cocaine habit, while Spud is still in a depressing circle of heroin addiction and failure. Francis Begbie is out of jail after spending most of the last 20 years incarcerated for murder, and is now splitting his time between committing robberies, intimidating his son and dealing with the disappointment of erectile dysfunction. For some reason, the authorities haven’t thought to look for him in his family home, but perhaps that’s just the state of the justice system in Scotland at the moment.

We all know that the original film deals with that period in your early 20s when life really could go either way, with the added menace of heroin addiction and post-industrial decline to heighten the stakes. "Choose Life" or "Choose not to choose life" as Renton so aptly put it. It really is a matter of life or death, as their old pal Tommy tragically found out. But in T2, the stakes are comparatively low. The film largely centres on Sick Boy trying to open a sauna, and getting a small business grant in the process, while Renton tries to avoid getting a kicking from Begbie, which he could have easily done, by just staying away from Edinburgh. So with a rather threadbare plot (that borrows its structure from Porno, the Irvine Welsh novel that follows on from Trainspotting), we find the film moving from set piece to set piece (Begbie chasing Renton out of a club, Mark and Sick Boy stealing from a Unionist pub) without anything really driving the whole thing forward.

Much like youth itself, Trainspotting lives in the moment, while T2 deals in nostalgia and looking back, the characters questioning decisions and mistakes they made along the way. But the only problem with that is that every time the characters hark back to a key moment from the earlier film, or a snippet of an iconic scene from Trainspotting is replayed on screen, or Danny Boyle makes a visual nod to the previous film (of which there are quite a few), you can’t help but be reminded of how much more of an exhilarating a film you could be watching. And while it's obviously unfair to compare the two, the amount of references to the original makes it very hard not to.

T2 is not without merit. As with most Danny Boyle films, there’s real visual verve and flair, the soundtrack is good (but not great) and all of the central performances live up to the hype (Johnny Lee Miller as Sick Boy and Ewen Bremner shine in particular). It's also got its brilliantly funny and remarkably tender moments. And sure, it’s nice to see the old gang back together. But will we still be talking about this film in 20 years? Or two months, even? It's doubtful.

T2 Trainspotting is in cinemas on Friday January 27

Sean Griffiths is Mixmag's Deputy Editor. Follow him on Twitter