★ ★ ★ ½ ☆
I’m not one of those people who grew up with Trainspotting. Heck, when it was first
released I was barely older than the baby crawling around Mother Superior’s
skag den. It does, however, hold a very special place in my heart. In the brief
period between my GCSEs ending and the summer holidays beginning, I had a lot
of free time and – not being a particularly sociable type – started to watch my
way through the family DVD shelves. Obviously, I was a few years too young to
be watching most of them but, if anything, that big red 18 certificate (and my
love for the Star Wars prequels) had
me keenly reaching for this Ewan McGregor film covered in laudatory quotes.
Films weren’t the same after that. Trainspotting was scummy, outrageously rude and utterly frank when
it came to drugs, sex and growing up…and I’d never seen anything like it. So it’s
fair to say that I had a different set of expectations for a sequel than those
returning after two decades of appreciation, and I think this disconnect
explains why T2 Trainspotting didn’t
completely gel for me in the way it did for my parents and clearly thousands of
others.
One thing it does get properly right is the characters. Surprisingly,
they’re all still alive. Unsurprisingly, they remain various flavours of
selfish, pitiful and psychotic. Sick Boy (Johnny Lee Miller) runs a pub but has
a share in blackmail, cannabis and coke addiction on the side. Spud (Ewen
Bremner) curls up every night in a hollow flat, miles away from his partner and
son, his final smile from the previous film betrayed by an immediate return to
heroin. Meanwhile, Begbie (Robert Carlyle) has made his escape from prison and
plots his revenge against Renton (McGregor), who’s returned to his old haunts
after twenty years in Amsterdam.
McGregor gets top billing, as expected, but his role is
arguably secondary this time around. Having spent so long outside of his former
friends’ world, Renton is now a sightseer. So the focus gradually shifts to the
one sympathetic character left in the frame: Spud. Bremner further cements his
place as one of his generation’s finest actors with a performance that retains every
weird idiosyncrasy that made the character so endearing in the first place, but
is tinged with Spud’s yearning to have his story heard above the macho posturing
of his fellows. McGregor, Miller and Carlyle return to their roles, but Bremner
advances his with an emotional maturity
that Renton, Sick Boy and Begbie have only reached physically.
The entire film almost feels like a low-key realisation that
maybe all the stuff you did when you were younger wasn’t such a good idea after
all. The boisterous tone of the ’96 original is gone, replaced with a
surprisingly frank bitterness and regret. Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography
is as vibrant as ever (I still maintain he’s the only man on earth who could
make a Transformers movie look good),
but the canted angles and hedonistic zooms are few and far between. Even the
soundtrack is supremely lacking in nostalgia until the last possible moment, choosing
not to wallow in old hits or bankable Top 40 tracks (see Fifty Shades Darker or even, to some extent, Boyle’s own The Beach). There’s a thematic and
technical handshake taking place, an agreement to turn it down from eleven.
And that’s what didn’t sit well with me. I’m not about to
dismiss a film for including subtext, but what Boyle’s original worked best when it wasn’t really about anything.
It was a sprawling, chaotic beast that provoked vomit and laughter in equal
measure and marked a change in the landscape of British cinema. Maybe I’m too in love with that anarchic spirit, too enveloped in
telling the older generations to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine, too busy
choosing Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and everything else Renton despises to
fully understand the existential bile of middle-aged regret.
However, I am also enough of a Danny Boyle fan to know when
he’s doing it right (incidentally, you all need to watch Trance again), and there’s still heaps to enjoy here. The dialogue
is excoriating, the emotional moments pack a punch and though the final moments
are a shade predictable, they tick the box in a very comforting, homely way.
