Movie Nation

“Diamond Cartel” bills itself as “The final film of Peter O’Toole.”

There are worse ways to draw interest to your blood-soaked, nonsensical Kazakhstan-filmed war between warlords debacle. Probably.

But there is no worse way for an actor to make his exit from the screen which he lit up for fifty years. Yeah, O’Toole wanted one last check so he took a tiny role in this silly slaughterhouse.

When he finally appears, as the veteran smuggler “Tugboat,” late in the third act, that plummy voice he was famous for is long gone. And even the gravelly one which his last films featured is denied us in this atrocity, a film which he no doubt died before he could loop and at least let his final character sound like him.

So they dubbed somebody else in doing a poor impersonation of Peter O’Toole.

And aside from that, and oh, dying before it came out, he got off easily. It’s Armand Assante, no stranger to D-movie disasters, and Michael Madsen and Tiny Lister and their fellow character actors Don “The Dragon” Wilson and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa who stuck around long enough to be humiliated by this picture.

“Cartel” is a badly-scripted thriller that lays bare the compromises and petty indignities of acting for the movies, and getting your movie financed. All those Western (and Eastern-Western) names were attached to Salamat Mukhammed-Ali’s film so he could get it financed.

They, in turn, shot on location in one of the garden spots of the planet (cough cough) and were paid (no doubt) peanuts to share the screen with local actors who had to be dubbed into English, in a movie that required start-to-finish voice-over narration to make a lick of sense.

Karlygash Mukhamedzhanova plays a one-time assassin, on the run with her lover (Alexey Fradetti) from the warlord/casino-owner/painter/horse lover/pianist Mussa, improbably played by Armand Assante.

Nurlan Alteyev is the perfectly menacing mass murderer paid to track them down. Tagawa is a rival warlord, Madsen and Lister show up for a single scene each, early on.

There’s this diamond, The Star of the East, that Mussa wants. We don’t actually see it.
We do, however, see the briefcase full of greenbacks that were supposed to buy it, which is what our lovers are on the run with.

There are vast gunfights, desert road car-chases and one scene of slaughter involving a shovel that is novel, not something we see in A, B or C movies. Usually.

It’s all just awful, with Assante abusing bit players (hair grabbing, stage slapping) and foaming at the mouth, and our narrator/heroine trying to make sense of it all with pithy voice overs.

“What you call a massacre, we call a Day at the Zoo!”

O’Toole, who left us in December of 2013, who began his big-screen career with a bit part in a passable version of “Kidnapped” before becoming a star in “Lawrence of Arabia” a couple of years later, makes his exit without any of the dignity he was due.

I hope they believe in ghosts in Kazakhstan, because there’s a chain-smoking English coot about to haunt everybody who so violated him, post mortem. He said “Yes” to the role, and he made a lot of movies that didn’t do his legacy any favors. But they certainly didn’t pay him enough money to leave him this ill-used.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence

Cast: Armand Assante, Karlygash Mukhamedzhanova, Nurlan Alteyev, Alexey Fradetti, Michael Madsen, Tiny Lister, Peter O’Toole

Credits:Directed by Salamat Mukhammed-Ali, script by Magamet Bachaev and Salamat Mukhammed-Ali. A Cleopatra release.

Running time: 1:37

Noomi Rapace is an old hand at making us fear for her, root for her to escape dire circumstances and keep the faith that whoever she’s playing, the woman is intrepid and not to be under-estimated.

The one and only “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is in jeopardy again in “Rupture,” a sci-fi tale of terror and torture porn whose title just might be a pun on “Rapture.”

Renee (Rapace) is just a single Kansas City mom with a temperamental tweenage son and a jerk of an ex husband. But “they” are watching her. They have hidden cameras all over her house. And one day, one of them (Michael Chiklis) sets her up for a tire blowout on the way to sky-diving.

An efficient yet not quite professional-looking team kidnaps her and drives her to an abandoned factory — somewhere. Others are there. She can hear their screams.

Enraged and terrified, “What do you WANT from me?” is what she yells when the alarming (How can she breathe?) plastic tape gag is peeled off. They covered her mouth and nose, lashed her to a bench in a delivery truch, but left her eyes free. They want her to see what she’s going to get.

“Are you the government? CDC? Do I have a virus?”

Nope. They’re the ones asking the questions, firm, clinical and unsympathetic. Lesley Manville and Kelly Bishe play two of Renee’s captor/tormentors. Chiklis, donning funny magnifying googles, does the interrogating.

“Any food allergies? Fear of snakes? Fear of SPIDERS?”

It’s a rhetorical question. They, and we, have seen her freak out over a spider in her house. So that’s to be it. This woman, who bragged to her child “I’m capable of ANYthing” as she headed skydiving, is being tested. And the test will involve spiders.

The script, by two guys who gave us “Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus” and “Secretary” and most tellingly, “Hard Candy,” between them, has a lot of first-time screenwriter clumsiness.

Never has foreshadowing in a film felt more obvious than when Renee stuffs an Exacto knife in her pocket.  Rarely is an elaborate three “clank” door lock given so much screen time, visually and aurally. Never has a big, roomy ventilation shaft felt more like a plot device.

Rapace makes Renee’s escape attempt as harrowing as you might expect. Her slight size builds “She’ll never it” into every role that puts her in harm’s way. The presence of veteran bad guy Peter Stormare (“Fargo,” “The Big Lebowski”) makes us fear the worst.

But the genre ID “sci-fi” unravels much of the suspense of “Rupture.” Her captors want to hasten her own “rupture,” and promise her release. “Why would they do that?” we wonder, distracted by this layer of the story. Are they alien brainwashers?

The middle acts are fraught with tension, the finale an utter cop out. Kind of makes you realize why we haven’t heard much from director/co-writer Steven Shainberg or co-writer Brian Nelson in years. They’ve outsmarted themselves, here.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, scenes of torture

Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Chiklis, Peter Stormare, Kerry Bishe, Lesley Manville

Credits:Directed by Steven Shainberg, written by Brian Nelson and Steven Shainberg. A — release.

Running time: 1:41

April is shaping up as its usual placeholder in terms of the Hollywood box office. Big summer movies are just a week or so away, animation and kids’ fare is dominating, and the older audience was thrown a bone this weekend in “Going in Style.”

“The Boss Baby” is headed toward a $26 million+ weekend, and should clear $100 million by next Thursday night. That’s enough to nudge it past “Beauty and the Beast” this weekend, which based on a big Friday, will hit $25 million.

The new wide release newcomers of note, “Smurfs: Lost Village” and “Going in Style” are reaching the low teens.   “Smurfs” will clear $14, “Going in Style” figures on hitting just over $12.

“The Case for Christ,” a faith-based polemic, cracked the top ten but isn’t blowing up in that “God’s Not Dead” way. Not yet.  A big Easter Sunday/Monday holiday boost could help it clear $5 million, but that doesn’t figure in Deadline.com’s projections. 

“Beauty and the Beast” will have earned $430 million by midnight Monday.

“Power Rangers” won’t reach $100 million, but considering the low-cost cast, it may be close enough. “Ghost in the Shell” is, like so many films already this year, a bomb.

The unworthy “Kong” is over $150, “Logan” will finish its run close to $230.

Channel surfing any service that specializes in classic films, your eye can’t help but be seized by the merest flash of a film by Max Ophüls. A master of mise en scene and a filmmaker who single-handedly expanded the boundaries of what came to be called film noir, Ophüls made 30 movies in Germany, France and Hollywood , most of them acknowledged masterpieces and every one of them a black and white feast for the eyes.

Maximilian Oppenheimer was born in Germany, a Jewish stage actor who took on the new last name to avoid shaming the family name.  His years of stage work, acting and then directing, inform his films, which have a theatrical quality — sets densely packed with layers of imagery, concentrated lighting and intense energy jammed within the frame.

Famed for his foggy, crowded nightlife scenes, his daylight exteriors, seen mostly in his French films, are just as brimming over with life, the lighting contrasts just as startling.

Every so often I stumble across one I haven’t seen, and instantly recognizing its origins, I’m drawn in. TCM recently ran “Le Plaisir,” a postcard pretty conceit rounding up three clever stories by Guy de Maupassant.  Nightlife scenes capture a fury of activity and smokey atmosphere, a church funeral in the last episode is practically a Dutch Master painting with its use of skylights stained glass (in a black and film) and candles.

“La Ronde” is his most famous film, similarly rococo in style, anecdotal and capturing a broad swath of life, this time in turn of the 20th century Vienna.

“The Earrings of Madame de...” recreates 19th century Paris high life again. This time, we meet a cavalcade of characters thanks to a pricey pair of earrings.

And then, there was my first unforgettable exposure to Ophüls, his Hollywood masterpiece, “Letter from an Unknown Woman.” The faint air of doom, broken romance and a lost place and time vividly come to life in this melodrama about a cowardly rake of a pianist (Louis Jordan) who gets a letter that may unravel the source of his downfall. Just gorgeous in its recreation of 19th century Vienna, it has as much Stefan Zweig bite as a Hollywood film of 1948 could have managed.

Does anyone today put as much care and craft into mise en scene (“putting in the scene”), fussing over framing, set dressing, decor, shadowy lighting and camera movement — through windows, street fog, smoke or snow? The texture of the images is what marks an Ophüls film, frame by frame. Who else is that visually particular?

Aside from Wes Anderson, a fluffier master of modern mise en scene, nobody comes to mind. He shares the maestro’s mania for detail in depth, the touches that make a world feel lived in, and at in films such as “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” least some of Ophüls’ passion for making his camera seem it is eavesdropping, slipping through windows, curtains and the like, uninvited, to deliver us to a world long gone.

Tomás didn’t want to make the trip. But he knew if he didn’t visit his old friend, Julián, “I’d regret it later.”

Julián (Ricardo Darín) is an Argentine actor who has made his life in Madrid. And now, that life is coming to an end. Getting that husky, smoker’s growl has a cost — lung cancer.

People, old friends/colleagues, “don’t know what to say to me,” he tells Tomás. And Tomás  (Javier Cámara) is no different. He’s often on the verge of tears. But he manned up, made the trip, even puts up with Julián’s aged, limping-drooling mastiff, Truman. It’s just for a few days, after all.

“Truman” is a soft-voiced Spanish melodrama about the final stages of death and dying. Julián has reached “acceptance.” Over the course of a four day visit, he drags Tomás into that stage with him.

But it’s going to be messy — sometimes amusingly so. Julián hasn’t told everybody — not his employer, the producer of the 18th century costume comedy he’s starring in, not his son away at college.

Julián is pretty much broke, which leaves Tomás to pick up a lot of checks, pay a dog walker, finance a last-minute flight to visit Julián’s son.

He’s most concerned about the dog. “Do dogs experience grief?” Tomás accompanies Julián to the vet, to interviews with people who might adopt the dog.

Tomás must deal with Julián’s sister (Dolores Fonzi), angry, worn-down yet vivacious and not as accepting of her sibling’s fate as that sibling is.

Cámara, best known for the Spanish import “Living is Easy With Eyes Closed,” about a teacher/Beatles fan trying to visit the set of a John Lennon filming in Spain in the ’60s, has a marvelous resignation about him. He makes Tomás a bit put-upon, unwilling to stand up to his friend’s many impositions even as he complains about them.

Darín, of “The Secret in Their Eyes,” has the swagger of a fading matinee idol, insensitive to the many ways his decisions are impositions on others. His Julián is also warm and charming and you easily believe others would bend to his easygoing will.

“Truman” doesn’t take us on a long journey, and despite the hook of naming it after the dog, we don’t get much of a sense of Julián’s undying affection for him. Truman is a life passage he’s about to finish, someone who was always there, through a divorce, good times and bad. Saying goodbye to the dog is saying “adios” to life.

But director and co-writer Cesc Gay (“Nico and Dani”) keeps the melancholy light and never lets the picture feel morose. “Truman” becomes a bittersweet character study in death and friendship, a film that lets the sweet overcome the bitter.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with adult subject matter, explicit sex

Cast: Ricardo Darín, Javier Cámara, Dolores Fonzi
Credits: Directed by Cesc Gay, written by Tomàs Aragay, Cesc Gay. A FilmRise release.
Running time: 1:48

A charitable view of the cutesy remake of 1979’s codger caper comedy “Going in Style” is that old age and the way we look at it have changed over the decades.

When three frail, lonely old men — Art Carney, George Burns, Lee Strasberg — decided to rob a bank out of boredom, raging against the acceptance of their own mortality, pushing 80 was a death sentence in and of itself.

Today, 80 is the new, um, 68? There are whole corners of the culture dedicated to the elderly — active senior communities, mobility scooters, age-friendly phones, senior dating websites, Fox News.

So sitcom vet Zac Braff and screenwriter Theodore Melfi had, at the very least, to cook up new motivations for three retirees (Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Alan Arkin) to knock off a bank. It’s just that they utterly defanged the movie, stripped it of pathos and any sense of reality and made it a simple “feel-good comedy” in the process.

There are hints of infirmity among the three former co-workers, Joe (Caine), Willie (Freeman) and Al (Arkin). Willie’s diabetic and needs a kidney. Mostly, it’s “other” old folks — guys in their lodge (Christopher Lloyd) who are doddering, on the verge of drooling incapacity. Mortality never really figures in it.

When a corporate merger eats their pensions and their bank is an enabler in this Wall Street sanctioned theft, these active seniors don’t have to take this sitting down. Joe’s witnessed a bank robbery. Why don’t they knock over that same bank, collect what’s owed to them and give the excess “to charity?”

That last detail scrubs what little edge this might have retained from the original film right off it.

“These banks practically destroyed this country,” Joe fumes.

“I want to live better than I am,” Willie agrees.

Al? He’s the sane one and has to be pretty much tricked into helping out.

There’s cute senior cursing and faintly lewd senior flirting (Ann-Margret, still getting it done). A trial run — attempting to shoplift at their local supermarket — earns them a sarcastic (and funny) dressing down from SNL’s Kenan Thompson.  Making your getaway in a store mobility scooter is good for a laugh.

And I liked the philosopher robber who refuses Joe’s wallet in the hold-up that inspires him to pull such a heist himself. The masked gunman tells Joe he’s “a casualty of a corrupt system that no longer serves The People,” and chides a society that doesn’t cherish the elderly. No, that’s not heavy-handed at all.

Mostly, though, Braff and Melfi trot out endless variations of “Maybe you’re having a stroke,” and “Life is short” jokes, trite plot points about a lack of visits from distant family and F-bombs delivered for cheap laughs by three Oscar-winning screen legends.

John Ortiz is their instructor in the rules of bank robbery and Matt Dillon is the FBI agent on their tail, both solid in supporting roles.

But for all its revelations about the changing definition of “aged,” “Going in Style” is never more than watered-down pandering. It has about as much satiric bite as a Polident commercial, a reverse mortgage of a movie promising dividends its enfeebled script never delivers.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for drug content, language and some suggestive material
Cast: Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Alan Arkin, Ann-Margret, John Ortiz, Matt Dillon
Credits: Directed by Zac Braff, written by Theodore Melfi, based on the Edward Cannon script to the 1979 film of the same title. A New Line/Warner Brothers release.
Running time:

There may be more accomplished, more famous “rock” photographers than Mick Rock.

But none were born with that perfect and instantly-memorable name. And few could match his stories, gathered from his insider, embedded background in the glam, punk and New Wave scenes of the 70s and 80s.

“Shot! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock” is just Mick, telling those stories, rummaging through his vast archives, sharing the incisive insights of a smart, Cambridge educated artist who just happened to make his art by taking pictures of an era in music.

Barnaby Clay is the credited director, but as the filmed interview is shot in black and white, as it is framed in a recreation of Rock’s 1996 near death experience and as it follows him — still working, still shooting concerts and album covers and fashion spreads with rockers — you’d swear the 69 year-old master of stills and early music videos was directing himself.

Rock has the vainglorious swagger, the self-studied style polished by years in the spotlight. And he delivers the expected bravura — “I’m an assassin. I’ve got my sights on you, and I’m going to take you out!”

He broke through with Pink Floyd alumnus Syd Barrett, made his mark by attaching himself to David Bowie (and through him Lou Reed and Iggy Pop) and blew up with that iconic cover to “Queen II.” Which, in the best of his “How I got that shot” anecdotes, Rock admits he cribbed from an iconic image of Marlene Dietrich.

That’s the genius of his method. He took a lot of great concert shots — of Bowie, Reed, Marley, et al. But for his fabulous posed images, Rock made a visual association.

Freddie Mercury, rock’s rising glamour “queen?” Dietrich. Joan Jett? Elvis. Talking Heads? “Children of the Damned.” Debbie “Blondie” Harry? “Monroe. Lolita.”

Rock, who hosted a provocative rock profiles TV show a couple of years back, can drop Rimbaud and Baudelaire and snippets of poetry and French into his bon mots. He has audio cassettes of conversations with Bowie and Reed to prove the closeness of his connection to him.

He’s frank about the poor pay, and his photo barter system for drugs when he was “heavily chemicalized” and least dependable. “Carly Simon said, ‘Oh he’s the best. But after the shoot, you can’t ever find him” to get the negatives and finish the job.

He’s obsessed with Reed, endlessly dropping the proto-punk poet’s name, lamenting that they fell out, for a time, because Rock was supposed to shoot Reed’s wedding and was a “chemicalized” no-show.

But for all the name-dropping and self-serving, self-glamorizing anecdotes, there’s a disarming casualness about Rock. Yeah, he shot The Ramones (“Ugliest band on the scene. At the time.”), but there were Motley Crue and Carly Simon shoots, and all these forgotten bands whose album covers he kept and looks at now with a “What the f— was THAT about?” And he’s there with TV on the Radio and Snoop and Father John Misty, just to show he’s still hip. Or determined to appear that way.

And he is, and “Shot!” makes for a light, smart and often funny/trippy dance through an era with the man whose images made icons out of many, and burned those icons into our visual memory.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with drug use, nudity, profanity

Cast: Mick Rock, Lou Reed, David Bowie

Credits:Directed by, script by Barnaby Clay . A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:30

We can imagine greater horrors than anything most movie makers can conjure up visually. It’s the unseen unknown that truly terrifies.

And for about 25 minutes, “The Void” lives up to that credo and the promise of its title. We witness a killing spree. A sheriff’s deputy collects a bloodied survivor and gets him to a tiny remote hospital.

Almost instantly, the violence explodes inside the building, and the hospital itself is under siege, encircled by mysterious hooded figures with giant black triangles on their cowls.

What’s going on here? We’ve barely caught our breath long enough to figure out the deputy’s (Aaron Poole) marginally competent and over-matched, the staff (Kenneth Welsh, Kathleen Munroe, et al) is isolated and in shock. Leave one of them alone, and she just might kill a patient.

A nurse trainee (Ellen Wong) is the last person you’d want to lean on in a crisis.

“Statistically, you’re much more likely to die in a hospital!”

There’s a pregnant girl (Grace Munro), her grandpa (James Millington), a state trooper (Art Hindle), and the fellow leading that killing spree (Daniel Fathers) has arrived to finish the job, not-exactly-explaining what the escaped victim (Evan Stern) did to bring all this horror down on them all.

“Yeah? What about you, Man of Mystery?”

“Mind your own business!”

And then, wham! We see tentacles crawling out of the mouths of the dead. We see the giant blob these belong to. The mystery evaporates and the siege and the movie built around fritter away every iota of tension that a good-at-showing-terror cast and the scenario have built up.

“The Void” devolves into a creature feature. The legions of hooded cultists, the people inside who “turn,” all routine and gory and not the least bit frightening.

Killer cult pictures are almost as common as monsters among us films. But the moment co-writers/directors Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski turn their movie over to the blob wrangler, “The Void” — with its wise-cracks and crackling, static-filled radios, it’s desperate dashes to fetch a shotgun from a police cruiser — exhausts all interest and falls apart.

The blob isn’t nearly as scary as something we cannot see. Nothing they do to finesse that — human acolytes of the blob, cult leaders — fixes that hole in the middle of “The Void.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence

Cast: Aaron Poole, Ellen Wong, Kenneth Welsh, Kathleen Munroe, Grace Munro, Daniel Fathers

Credits: Written and directed by Jeremy Gillespie, Steven Kostanski. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:30

Those sexist eunuchs that warped a generation discover “The Future is Female” in “Smurfs: The Lost Village,” a Neil Patrick Harris-free reboot of this insipid franchise.

There’s no live-action, Smurfs-in-the-Real-World element to the first Smurfs movie since 2013, just polished animation with a fresh set of famous actors doing the voices.

Same Smurf puns — “Code Blue!”

Same patriarchy, with Papa Smurf trying to rein in the adventurous Single Smurf Female, Smurfette.

Same “Smurf-obsessed wannabe wizard,” Gargamel.

“Smurfs! Why won’t they just DIE?”

Same candy-colored forest, this time with colorful dragonflies, Smurf-eating plants and the like. Same sort of unchallenging story, traveling through The Forbidden Forest and The Swamp of No Return, a tale aimed at five-and-unders.

Only this time, we have Oscar winner Julia Roberts as leader of an Amazonian branch of the Smurf diaspora, Michelle Rodriguez as the toughest Smurf of them all, Rainn Wilson as Gargamel, Demi Lovato as Smurfette, and Joe Manganiello as Hefty Smurf.

And since there is no point to making any cartoon without the cartoon-voiced Jack McBrayer, he’s Clumsy Smurf.

That’s the sole challenge and only entertainment value in this nicely-animated drivel, figuring out the voices. And there I’ve gone and spoiled it for you.

Do Gordon Ramsay, Titus Burgess, Ellie Kemper and Ariel Winter really voice bit parts?

The only chuckle any savvy viewer will pull from this is the sound of Mandy Patinkin as Papa Smurf. His reputation as the most unpleasant diva in Hollywood makes one laugh at him being sentenced to this Belgian blue hell, if only for the single afternoon it must have taken him to record his part.

MPAA Rating: PG for some mild action and rude humor

Cast:  The voices of Demi Lovato, Julia Roberts, Rainn Wilson, Mandy Patinkin, Joe Manganiello, Michelle Rodriguez, Jack McBrayer

Credits:Directed by Kelly Asbury, script by Stacey Harman, Pamela Ribon. A Columbia/Sony Animation release.

Running time: 1:29

Any  honest, accurate sequel to “Trainspotting,” the 1996 film based on Irvine Welsh’s flinty-funny novel about heroin addiction, love, hijinks and capers going wrong in Edinburgh, would have to be even more littered with corpses than the original.

Twenty years on and most of these needle-sharing losers would be dead — and not just walking dead, with the faces and physiques that betray years of abuse.

But that would be a mighty short Danny Boyle film, and totally spoil the nostalgia and affection he and his cast felt by revisiting that story, that place and that time. Amusing and toothless is what they went for.

So in “T2 Trainspotting,” Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) comes home for a brief visit. He took off with the loot from the caper from the first film, heading to Amsterdam to get his life on track. That’s like retiring to North Carolina to quit smoking, but the irony’s intentional (no doubt).

He’s a married accountant, and catching up with the former Sick Boy, Simon (Jonny Lee Miller), he discovers his old mate has moved on to cocaine and digital blackmail schemes with a Bulgarian hooker (Anjela Nedyalkova), and that he’s never forgiven Renton for the betrayal.

“I’m gonna make him sorry he ever came back.”

Begbie (Robert Carlyle) still needs subtitles for us to understand his slang-riddled Scots accent. He’s spent years in prison, which probably extended his life. He, too, hasn’t forgiven and forgotten Renton.

Only Spud (Ewen Bremner) has maintained the lifestyle, clinging to the Horse as his only true friend, losing touch with his one-love Gail (Shirley Henderson) and their son despite AA meetings and an desperate desire to kick.

Whatever Renton’s intentions, he is lured back into this world. He’s just another nostalgic Brit swamped in a culture that lives in the past, “a tourist in your own youth.” He’s not unaware that “the world changes, even if we don’t.” Change is all around them, the Leith and Edinburgh of decay is mostly gone.

They’re all in their late 40s, and they each figure out the only way to feel alive is to recapture that past — the razor’s edge of drugs, casual relationships and violence that marked their youth.

Boyle revisits the early hallmarks of his style; extreme close-ups, artsy effects, pop-jangled score. He quotes from the original film’s dazzling soundtrack and iconic images. hiking the same hills, bathing in the changing textures of the times and wallowing, here and there, in nostalgia.

There’s one properly seedy pub, which the lads scheme to turn into a bordello (helped by government grants), and one flashy club scenes where those sing-along-Scots revel in the yesteryear of Queen and”Radio Gaga.”

And there two killer moments, though nothing on a par with the vile toilet or baby dying of neglect of the first film. Here, we have McGregor and Miller singing to weepy Catholic hating Orangemen and McGregor explaining, in a breathless riff full of sarcasm, rage and wit, the “Choose Life” motto of Thatcherite Britain, mock-embraced by Wham!, ridiculed in the original “Trainspotting.”

“Choose slut-shaming. Choose never learning from your mistakes…Choose 9/11 never happened.”

McGregor settles nicely back into Renton, and Miller shows his mileage in some early scenes (dyeing his hair gives us the Sick Boy of old). Carlyle’s Begbie is thick-featured, has lost some sex drive, but not the testosteroned urge to head-butt his way out of a jam.

And Bremner’s Spud, the longest survivor of the deadly addiction, turns out to be the one with the best memory, the bard for their “lost youth.”

That’s meant ironically, too, I suppose. But it’s not nitpicking to see that this is a seriously defanged affair, a sequel that lacks the punch or novelty of the original. Novelist Welsh and Boyle do little to bring gender equality to this world. Putting a new starlet into the gang’s midst upsets the balance and steals screen from Henderson, and in a glorified cameo, Kelly Macdonald (in a single scene, giving the film’s best performance)– female survivors of that epidemic.

It is a story of a reckoning — several reckonings — that is afraid of actually wrestling with the consequences of betrayal and self-abuse, of letting its characters naturally mellow or die because they can’t.

It may give fans like me a bit of the warm and fuzzies, seeing these lads again. But if “Trainspotting” was alternately life-sapping and life-affirming, giddy and grim, hilarious and alarming, “T2” never achieves either the same highs or lows and is all the poorer for it.

MPAA Rating: R for drug use, language throughout, strong sexual content, graphic nudity and some violence
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller, Anjela Nedyalkova, Robert Carlyle, Ewen Bremner, Shirley Henderson, Kelly Macdonald
Credits: Directed by Danny Boyle, script by John Hodge, based on the Irvine Welsh novels. A Sony/Tristar release.
Running time: 1:57