T2 Trainspotting,
There’s something reassuring about how little Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud and Renton have learned about life in the past two decades.
A generation after these characters from Danny Boyle’s “Trainspotting” shocked and amused with their heroin-junkie antics, Boyle’s long-awaited sequel T2 Trainspotting returns to Edinburgh to find they’re still the same screw-ups as before. No boring Hollywood redemption for these lads.
Flash man Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) is running a sex blackmailing operation with his new girlfriend/combatant Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova).
Head case Begbie (Robert Carlyle) is planning to bust out of prison, where he’s been for the past 20 years, atoning for all kinds of violent crimes.
Sad sack Spud (Ewen Bremner) is still on the junk, a habit that, along with suicidal depression, could leave him like the group’s lost pal Tommy (RIP).
Renton (Ewan McGregor), ever the cunning catalyst, has been hiding out in Amsterdam ever since he stole the big bag of cash from his supposed pals in the London drug deal that ending Trainspotting. He’s acquired a wife and a job in “stock management software for the retail sector,” but it’s not the life he would have chosen for himself — and it’s about to blow up in his face.
Events transpire to bring these four back together, although Boyle and returning screenwriter John Hodge, once again adapting the prose of Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting, Porno), tease out the inevitable reckoning.
And with good reason. The four knuckleheads, now unhappily middle-aged — “I’m 46 and f---ed!” Renton wails — have a lot of figuring out to do.
There’s the matter of the missing money, and the betrayal behind it. There are women from both the past (Kelly Macdonald’s Diane cameos) and present (Veronika’s a real firecracker) to contend with. There are also a few children, the product of all the sowing of wild oats.
Something that passes for introspection crosses the mind of at least three of the characters — Spud turns out to have literary aspirations — but Begbie is as crazy as ever. No singing of “Auld Lang Syne” for him.
“We were young. Bad things happened. It’s over,” he snaps.
By “over” he doesn’t mean gone and forgotten. Begbie wants revenge, and his share of the stolen money.
A certain number of callbacks are both desired and essential, and Boyle keeps them to a brisk minimum: Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life” is still on the soundtrack (as are some great modern tunes); Scottish pub toilets are every bit as disgusting as before; “Choose Life” is still a cynically ironic slogan.
The drug use has been dialed down, more for narrative reasons than censorship fears, although Anthony Dod Mantle, Boyle’s go-to cinematographer (Slumdog Million, 28 Days Later, 127 Hours), maintains the woozy connection with interesting camera angles.
A recurring motif of wrecked cars and industrial waste being piled up outside Sick Boy’s flat recalls the first film’s sensation that society is bent on destroying itself.
It’s inevitable, I suppose, that a sequel to “Trainspotting” could never be as audacious as the first movie, part of the indie film revolution of the 1990s.
But it’s great to see these guys again, and you can bet we haven’t heard the last of them.
Boyle employs a fantastic visual cue that hints at resolution being just a shot away but also never fully realized, the junkie’s eternal dilemma.
Renton returns to his bedroom in his family home, the one with trains on the wallpaper, and studies his old record collection.
He looks like he’s about to drop the needle on David Bowie’s LP “The Man Who Sold the World.” Waiting … waiting … we’re held in suspense, as always.