Choose to read Trainspotting sequel review
Twenty years after Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie and Spud first exploded on to the big screen, The Scotsman’s film critic Alistair Harkness has attended the preview of the long-awaited sequel T2 Trainspotting.
A screening for critics took place in London’s West End last night ahead of the film’s premiere, which will be at Fountain Park in Edinburgh on Sunday. Stars Ewan Mcgregor, Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller are expected to attend.
film – which reunites Ewan Mcgregor, Jonny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle and Ewen Bremner – is that it hasn’t completely tarnished the original. Fears of a nostalgic cash-grab were prevalent after the trailer and, according to Boyle – who introduced this first screening – during the making of the film as well. (“This isn’t going to be shite is it Danny?” his cast kept asking him). But Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge have played around with the idea of nostalgia in some interesting ways, using the loose framework of Welsh’s own follow-up novel, Porno, to craft a story about friendship and regret and the passage of time.
A real-time sequel set 20 years later, it certainly shows flashes of brilliance as it deploys inventive flashbacks to the original to reinforce the shock of time’s passage: the way memories linger in the streets you run, the buildings you pass, the people you see. Still, that poignancy can feel a little forced too, particularly when characters – usually the underwritten women – ask Renton or Sick Boy or Spud to clarify something about their lives (one scene designed to give Mcgregor the chance to update his “Choose Life” monologue is utterly terrible). They overegg it too with a late plot development for Spud that allows them to start drawing directly from Welsh’s original text and a shoehorned-in cameo for Kelly Macdonald also goes nowhere.
Other nods, though – like the two-second blast of Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life near the start – have the desired effect of jolting the film to life, and when some of the characters finally confront each other, the effect can be electric. But Boyle’s frenetic, collage-like directing style, particularly as he re-introduces us to the characters amid a torrent of coke, vomit and violence also gives the film a trying-toohard feel.
It in the end it’s alright, but that’s the problem with nostalgia, it’s never going to be as good as it was.