Yahoo News Is T2 Trainspotting worth the 20-year wait?
We've been waiting 20 years, and now director Danny Boyle and star Ewan McGregor's Trainspotting cinema is almost here.
There's been huge hype for T2 Trainspotting, which brings a now heroin-free Renton back to Scotland to make peace with the friends and enemies he deserted years ago.
It's an intriguing premise, but does Danny Boyle carry it off in the end? Let's take a look at the first reviews for the long-awaited T2 Trainspotting below:
DIGITAL SPY:
"If you're a fan of the original there are references, flashbacks and the sweet tourism of nostalgia to enjoy which compensate for a paucity of plot. Boyle is a good film maker, but this isn't a good story.
"And if you've never seen Trainspotting there's basically nothing here for you at all. If you have, it's worth visiting with Renton and the gang for a Where Are They Now '90s hit. But you might want to choose DVD."
"Danny Boyle's T2 Trainspotting is everything I could reasonably have hoped for - scary, funny, desperately sad, with many a bold visual flourish. What began as a zeitgeisty outlaw romp in the Uncool Britannia of the 1990s is now reborn as a scabrous and brutal black comedy about middle-aged male disappointment and fear of death."
"Perhaps it's too much to expect it to be as good as the original – it's not. Sometimes it feels a bit too enslaved to the first film and there are problems... Ultimately, T2 is a grown-up sequel made with refreshing and startling maturity. It's a sobering look at how your lust for life ultimately becomes corrupted and dragged down – not by drugs and youth's trigger happy desire for self-destruction – but by life itself."
"Shadows of past glories suffocate present endeavors in T2 Trainspotting, the long-awaited, much-delayed and disappointingly redundant follow-up to Danny Boyle's 1996 'Cool Britannia' sensation Trainspotting. Reuniting Boyle with writer John Hodge, producer Andrew MacDonald and most of the original cast - top-billed Ewan McGregor reprises his breakthrough role of the charismatically rebellious Scottish drug addict Renton - this darkly larkish crime-flavored character-comedy will doubtless score very big on its skillfully-hyped UK-and-Ireland January 27 bow, but looks of niche interest farther afield."
"In some senses T2 shares elements with its Terminator namesake. It's inventive and full of surprises. But unlike Cameron's sequel, it doesn't reimagine the original in quite the same glorious way."
SCOTTISH DAILY RECORD: "Despite topical references to social media and zero hours contracts, T2 understands it won't capture the youthful zeitgeist the way Trainspotting did.
"It drowns in large shots of nostalgia, regret and wasted lives. The sharp and funny script chooses to honour the characters by allowing them to mature disgracefully while still being sympathetic towards them. Take a deep breath. Choose cinema. Choose first class. Choose Trainspotting 2."
T2 Trainspotting opens on Friday, January 27 in the UK and hits the US later in the year.
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