T2: Trainspotting Reviewed

Lust for Strife

♦The boys are back after 20 years but what did Senior Editor ANDREW COLMAN think of Danny Boyle’s sequel to Trainspotting, T2: Trainspotting, out in UK cinemas from this Friday?

T2: Trainspotting
Director: Danny Boyle
Stars: Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller

“This is all just an exercise in nostalgia”, says Simon “Sick Boy” Williamson (Jonny Lee Miller), to his friend and sometime adversary Renton (Ewan McGregor) whilst the gnarled pair survey the bucolic scene where the latter made his declamatory “It’s shite being Scottish” speech twenty years earlier. The original Trainspotting was that rare and unusual British film – a witty, daring entry that challenged and enthralled in equal measure, set in the present, tackling issues and wayward characters head on with brutal alacrity. It had assurance and conviction, and was almost knowing in its certainty that it would capture the zeitgeist (apologies for using that word) and become British movie of the decade.

And it was. It almost seems redundant already to list the potential pitfalls of following up such a sleazy, heartbreaking, magical little gem, such as the possibility of it being a tribute, a reboot, a remix, a superfluous addendum, lacking the certainty or focus of the original while occasionally tipping its hat to audience expectation. Pleasing or beguiling such an audience, many of whom would’ve grown old with the characters, would require a remarkable, inspired balancing act to avoid being either too tenuously connected or slavish to the first outing.

Renton, the focal point and narrator from T2’s predecessor, opts to return to Edinburgh, having skipped town twenty years earlier with his friends’ money, eager to mend bridges and make the same mistakes again. His reappearance elicits mixed responses from his former cronies, notably the ever-psychotic Franco Begbie (Robert Carlyle), conveniently sprung from jail and consumed by revenge. The vapidly amoral Simon is equally vengeful but pragmatically decides to forgive Renton, bringing him in as a partner for his ludicrously nasty schemes. Danny “Spud” Murphy (Ewen Bremner), the only practising junkie left in the ensemble, is far more happy to see his old addict-in-arms, who he considers a reminder of happier, less diffuse times (he’s more unintelligible than previously!).

Inevitably the film often struggles against the lack of a cogent thread, not to mention Renton’s baleful voiceover – the cadences, sledgehammer dance music, jump cuts and hair-raising tropes are all intact, but the manifest despair, youthful alienation, and bleakness are not there to leaven the story with depth. However there’s no fault in the acting, which hasn’t lost any edge despite the long hiatus – the cast comfortably re-inhabit their roles. There are a couple of bravura sequences, such as when Renton and Simon find themselves in a particularly sectarian pub in the boondocks. The authentic grimness threatens to return here, but fails to really manifest itself.

And then there’s the nods to the audience, reminding us about what the word “Trainspotting” actually means, along with a patented Irvine Welsh rant, this time set in a posh café. Here Renton, Welsh’s mouthpiece once more, draws us back in with a brilliant slab of hyper- polemic, both surpassing the original “Choose life” moment while prodding the viewer about the onset of his or her digitally-enforced inertia. But the diatribe, aimed squarely at a young Eastern European prostitute (Anjela Nedyalkova) he has befriended, seems out of kilter and quickly dissipates into the ether.

If there is a theme amidst the compelling detritus, it arrives a little late in the tale, and does seem somewhat tacked on – the aforementioned predictable nostalgia, and the inflexibility of the protagonists’ lives. Renton and Simon taunt one another with misdeeds of their youth, and even Begbie, briefly humanized as a man out of time who can only revel in his earlier notoriety, falls prey, like the audience, to reminiscences of a carefree age. These characters have changed, but not much, and are no better than they were. All that they have become is older and lost in the past, in an even more disconnected era than the mid 1990s. At the end of the movie we feel as distanced from the proceedings as they do. Ironically there was more hope, depth and identity in the first film, due to the main players’ drug dependency and desire to free themselves from its tyranny. Now they are aimless, in a production where political and social context are absent, which is odd considering the team behind it.

That isn’t to say that T2 is a bad effort, or even necessarily a serious disappointment – the first film genuinely raised the bar, arriving on a high for pop culture here in general, especially concerning its new motif of Britishness. Now the bar has been lowered in terms of cutting edge cinema, this film will still be one of the best of the year, regardless of my misgivings over its ambition. Faint praise aside, T2 could only ever have been what it is, and it would’ve been churlish to expect more. Couple that with the chance to see Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie once again, and it still plays. And the beautifully poignant (but all too brief) scene when Renton goes back to his parents’ home is worth the price of admission.

And for that it gets four stars rather than the expected three.

T2: Trainspotting comes out in UK cinemas from this Friday, 27 January 2017.

T2 Trainspotting review www.tripwiremagazine.co.uk