Someone asked me recently what my favourite movie is. I thought through some obvious ones (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) and some less obvious ones (28 Days Later) before settling on Trainspotting, Danny Boyle’s surreal, scabrous and uproarious 1996 black comedy about a group of Edinburgh heroin addicts. Emerging squarely in the middle of the Britpop era Trainspotting defined a generation of British film-making, thanks to its legendary soundtrack and a wickedly funny script that has passed into pop culture (“Choose life!”). It’s an unbelievably brilliant film.
The question is, did it really need a sequel? It’s hard not to feel more than a touch of apprehension about this reunion tour. There’s plenty of bad films out there, but a misjudged sequel to a beloved movie can be especially painful (Blues Brothers 2000, I’m looking squarely at you). It’s a concern that Boyle, returning to directing duties, seems at least to be aware of – the need for this sequel to create some magic of its own and avoid being, in the words of one character here, ‘a tourist in your own youth’.
In a nod to the first film T2 begins with a close-up of some pounding feet, but this time out it’s a treadmill, not Princes Street, on which Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) paces. After twenty years in Amsterdam, and having given up heroin, Renton at last returns to Edinburgh. There he reconnects with former friends Simon (Jonny Lee Miller) and Spud (Ewan Bremner) while trying to avoid the attentions of Begbie (Robert Carlyle), who still bears a grudge against Renton for ripping him off in a drug deal two decades previously.
It’s genuinely good fun to see the gang back together, and the intervening years have done nothing to dull the talents of the lead actors. Miller is superb as Simon, who’s making a faltering attempt at a career in pimping and blackmail and whose self-loathing seems to compete for prominence with his hatred of the wider world. Carlyle is as wonderfully psychotic as ever as Begbie, a seething mass of sociopathic violence who seems ready to boil over at any moment. MacGregor finds himself stuck playing the straight man – as the relative voice of reason Renton always was one of the less interesting characters – but he does get given a great update of the Choose Life speech.
It’s Bremner though who really steals the show as the thoroughly likeable fuck-up Spud, still addicted to heroin and pulling petty scams to get through the day. With his gormless attitude and incredible rubber features Spud provides most of the film’s comic relief (including one genuinely great gross-out sight gag), and yet in his own way is T2‘s real hero.
The pickings are less rich for the film’s female characters. Angela Nedyalkova is an engaging presence as Veronika, Simon’s Bulgarian prostitute girlfriend, but she’s never really allowed to be much more than the archetypal hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold. Kelly Macdonald’s high billing belies what is a disappointingly short cameo as Renton’s former love interest Diane, and it would have nice to see more of Shirley Henderson, who makes a brief re-appearance as Spud’s ex-girlfriend.
The first thing fans of Trainspotting will notice is how much more straightforward the sequel is than its predecessor. Whereas the original was essentially a series of short stories, T2 plays out as a more linear caper, as Renton, Simon, Spud and Veronika attempt to set up a brothel. Mostly gone too are the surreal camera tricks of yore (Anthony Dod Mantle replaces Brian Tufano as cinematographer). Which is not to say there aren’t a few truly brilliant scenes. A split-screen scene in a club toilets is a hilarious exercise in silent comedy, while a singalong in a Loyalist bar (a nod to the Scottish sectarianism largely excised from the original movie) nearly had me in tears of laughter. But some of the energy of old, some of the kineticism, has gone. It’s hard not to feel like in many respects T2 has been de-fanged.
But then, maybe a loss of energy is to be expected – the gang is getting older after all, and don’t they know it. These are characters for whom life hasn’t turned out the way they’d hoped, and now, firmly in their 40s, they’re wondering where it all went wrong. There’s an unexpectedly reflective tone to T2, an air of melancholy that hangs over everything, particularly in the final act. It’s initially a little jarring (the original certainly had its bleak moments but for the most part it was pretty much an out-and-out comedy) but as time wears on it becomes quietly effective.
Boyle makes a valiant attempt to update Trainspotting for the modern age with a soundtrack that includes the likes of Wolf Alice and Young Fathers alongside the more familiar strains of Underworld and Iggy Pop. The failure to mention the Scottish independence referendum though does feel like a missed opportunity – it would surely have made an interesting coda to Renton’s “it’s shite being Scottish” speech from the first film.
“Nostalgia, that’s why you’re here,” sneers Simon at one stage. And there’s some truth in that – for audiences who fell in love with these characters back in 1996 there’s a lot of fun to be had in watching the gang get back up to their old tricks. T2 is frequently hilarious, and at times surprisingly poignant. But it never escapes the shadow of its predecessor – it feels so much less rebellious, so much less vital. This is not a movie that will define a generation of British film-making.
It’s far from the disaster some had feared. And as a friend said as we were leaving the cinema, ‘For a sequel no one ever asked for it was good enough.” The question is though, with Trainspotting, is ‘good enough’ good enough?
7/10
The Mongoose 