T2 Trainspotting **** (2017, Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle, Kelly Macdonald, Shirley Henderson, Anjela Nedyalkova) – Movie Review

Two decades on from Trainspotting (1996), the 46-year-old Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) returns from a new life in Amsterdam to the one place he can call home, Edinburgh, where he is reunited with Spud (Ewen Bremner), Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), and even Begbie (Robert Carlyle), who breaks out of prison hospital.

For taking an opportunity (their money) and his betrayal at the end of the original Trainspotting (1996), Renton risks a lot reconnecting, even his life. Spud (burnt out but now off heroin) has forgiven Renton, Sick Boy (now running a run-down pub) apparently has not and the still crazy Begbie has certainly not.

T2 Trainspotting is full of fizz and raw energy. Original director Danny Boyle is back with his four stars from 20 years ago and they have all still got it. The film seems occasionally as though it might bottle out at any time, but it doesn’t. Despite its mood of sentimental nostalgia, it’s still Trainspotting, still an uber-disturbing film to send the Scottish Tourist Board and the right-wing British press into proper paroxysms.

Boyle turns it into both a proper film and a real art work, every frame looking like a picture, not a pretty picture, of course, but an incredibly striking one (cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle, production design by Mark Tildesley). He’s also managed another great, essential soundtrack, though I imagine that was easier to achieve than the great visuals.

It was dangerous to revisit Trainspotting after more than two decades. It is arguably the great British movie of the Nineties. It doesn’t need a sequel any more than the sequel would need 3D. But if it was going to have one, they really should have done it 17 or 18 years ago. However, against the odds, they’ve pulled it off. McGregor is fired up in the most extraordinary way, and so, too, are the other, all pulling their weight equally. Bremner’s dark comedy turn is brilliantly skilled, Jonny Lee Miller is scary, and Robert Carlyle is scarier. They play their alienated characters as hard as back in 1996.

McGregor has one particularly brilliant sour, world-weary rant as Renton: ‘Choose life Choose Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and hope that someone, somewhere cares Choose looking up old flames, wishing you’d done it all differently And choose watching history repeat itself Choose your future 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, and smother the pain with an unknown dose of an unknown drug made in somebody’s kitchen And then take a deep breath…’ McGregor makes a brilliant job of it.

John Hodge’s screenplay is tremendous, freely adapting the sequel novel Porno by Irvine Welsh, who also appears as Mikey Forrester. Kelly Macdonald and Shirley Henderson appear briefly as Diane and Gail, but have disappointingly little to do. Anjela Nedyalkova gets the main female role as Nikki, the Bulgarian prostitute Sick Boy is in the sex game with, and makes something of it.

Edinburgh provides a poignant backdrop, but here more of a city of desperation and decay than of international tourism. Poor old Edinburgh, what did it ever do to deserve Trainspotting? Welsh, Hodge and Boyle are here to tell you.

The question is, how did the sweet young kids Boyle shows us in flashbacks to childhood turn out to be the scary old monsters on 2017. The film provides clues but no real answers. It also provides a lot of hard-edged entertainment, and four great, indelible characters, first-class fodder for long-starved British actors.

Is it as good as Trainspotting? Well, of course not. That was a true original. But it is an honourable, occasionally even inspired sequel.

It is the first time since since A Life Less Ordinary (1997) that McGregor and Boyle have worked together, after falling out when McGregor was dumped as the lead in The Beach (2000) in favour of Leonardo DiCaprio.

The film was titled Porno in development but Boyle stated it would be titled T2 if approved by James Cameron, the director of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), widely known as T2.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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