“T2 Trainspotting,” an apt and realistic sequel some 20 years after the initial film “Trainspotting,” based on Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel of the same name, is a grim look at middle-aged life after misspent youth. 
STARS: 3/5
“Trainspotting” provided its actors and director with break-out success, and its outrageous wit and ingenuity made it an infamous cult classic. For such a believable and satisfying sequel, “T2 Trainspotting” leaned on its predecessor’s iconography a bit too heavily to support its radically different tone of melancholy and nostalgia in place of ephemeral bliss. 
It would be impossible for “T2” to live up to “Trainspotting,” one of the most successful films ever made in Britain, which quickly came to represent a culture of ambition, unemployment and AIDS. The watered-down sequel depicting faded, once-drug-induced youth matches the film’s overall suggestion that nostalgia is just as addictive as heroin and can be equally as dangerous. 
Picking up 20 years after Mark Renton’s dubious one-over of his three friends amid a drug deal, Renton (Ewan McGregor) returns to Edinburgh after going AWOL. His initial reason for coming back is visiting family and friends he never looked back on, along with helping the latter recover from addictions he has since overcome. 
But fittingly, nostalgia rears its head as the true motivation for Renton, who admits to never obtaining the life he always dreamed of after betraying his friends in the finale of “Trainspotting.”
There is charm in the same actors and director returning, aged alongside their characters, to show how the fantastical ’90s original played out for these now-sallow leftovers. Simon (Johnny Lee Miller), Renton’s closest pal, is still living on small criminal undertakings, hoping for a break to turn a run-down bar into an upscale brothel. 
Begbie (Robert Carlyle), the frighteningly violent one of the gang, is fittingly making a bloody escape from prison. Spud (Ewen Bremner), the only person Renton left a share of the gang’s cash to, turned things around for a bit, but eventually fell back into his pitiful circumstances.
If the first film revolved around Renton, “T2” slowly settles on Spud, who is first reintroduced telling a hilarious story of how his biggest obstacle to sobriety is daylight savings time. His rapid, twisting, sometimes-incoherent speech has not changed with the exception of a touch of clarity now that he is arguably doing better in his attempts to stay sober. His negligible change in manner and appearance feel comfortable in a familiar film jarringly set in the modern world.
However, appearances become deceiving as Spud’s characterization grows the most, progressing from a pitiful character into the film’s closest thing to a hero and an ally of the film’s only new character, Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova). 
Nedyalkova, along with Bremner, grounds every scene she touches, playing a Bulgarian prostitute and Simon’s business partner. Both Veronika and Spud are the only two not succumbing to nostalgia — this film’s deadly drug — or at least understand its toxicity, making them the characters viewers can most easily root for.
While “T2” does feel like a watered down version of the original, with fewer dodgy camera angles and less use of surrealist visuals, it seems fitting given Britain’s grungiest quartet are now middle-aged dads trying to reconcile with discomposed pasts. Trading in ecstasy for disillusion and dismay nearly overwhelmed the film but admittedly created a realistic and satisfyingly cyclical feel.