★★★★☆
“Choose life, choose Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and hope that someone somewhere cares . . . choose reality TV, slut shaming, revenge porn. Choose a zero-hour contract, a two-hour journey to work, and choose the same for your kids only worse.” Yes, Ewan McGregor is back as Renton, racing through the streets of Edinburgh, roaring a new anthem of despair. Except 20 years later, he’s middle aged. And on a tram.
The manic energy of the original 1996 film has sporadic outbreaks in T2: Trainspotting, but director Danny Boyle is in a more melancholy mood and the story is freighted with self-referential nostalgia and flashbacks to the early days.
You may remember that Renton disappeared at the end of the 1996 original film to Amsterdam with a pile of his mates’ ill-gotten cash. But the siren call of Edinburgh and friends Spud (Ewen Bremner) and Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) brings him home – and into the eternally psychotic and unpredictable orbit of Franco Begbie (Robert Carlyle) who has just released himself from prison.
Spud is still battling heroin addiction, while Renton at 46 has stayed clean and prospered — he’s a Lycra-clad jogger now. His friends are in terminal decline, as are large parts of Leith where Sick Boy now runs his aunt’s pub, just beyond the reach of gentrification. At least he has a sideline in brothels and blackmail. The reunion of Sick Boy and Renton erupts in electric anger, with a pool cue to the fore of the action, which literally drowns in Irn Bru.
The rekindled ties are knotty to say the least, but in one standout scene, Renton and Sick Boy are forced to sing in a Protestant Orangemen’s club, belting out “No More Catholics!” to an appreciative audience. Plus Kelly Macdonald reappears in a cameo as a lawyer — having once played an underage schoolgirl in a club — and ticks Renton off for the youthfulness of his new friend Veronica, a Bulgarian prostitute.
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For those steeped in the original film, T2 will make more sense as early scenes are cleverly echoed. The men are “tourists in their own youth” as someone says, and there’s no going back: indeed Spud is crenellated with wrinkles, wizened with 20 years of abuse on his chart, plus a lost wife and child.
With a script written by John Hodges, partially based on the Irvine Welsh novel Porno, and a rambunctious soundtrack with reboots of the Prodigy remix of Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life, Underworld, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the film is like riding a tragi-comic wave.
The original actors have matured well (perhaps too well; they should be flabbier) and while the lunatic enthusiasm of youth has disappeared, they give their nuanced all here.
T2: Trainspotting opens on January 27