One early
moment in Danny Boyle’s bittersweet Trainspotting sequel T2 encapsulates everything that follows, good and bad. Returning to
the Edinburgh semi he abandoned two decades ago – mother gone, father going –
Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) heads upstairs to his old bedroom and starts
rifling through his vinyl collection. Easing an LP from its sleeve – Boyle’s
careful handling of pop culture already in evidence – he cues one unmistakable
picosecond of “Lust for Life” before pulling the needle away. Music. Memories.
Too much. Can you ever truly go home? And if so, what do you do with yourself
once you’re back?
So yes, they’ve
got the band back together again – and remember that the first film exploded
into that post-Four Weddings, pre-Full Monty interlude when British cinema seemed
like a new rock ‘n’ roll. We now rejoin Renton on tour, leaving a wife behind
in Amsterdam to visit the pals he fleeced way back when: Sick Boy (Jonny Lee
Miller), running his auntie’s rundown pub and, more lucratively, a blackmail
scam; Begbie (Robert Carlyle) busting out of prison, as furious as ever; and
poor, lovable, surely doomed Spud (Ewen Bremner), helplessly dependent on the
heroin everybody else has left behind.
Aligning the
actors’ schedules was a logistical feat, but T2’s trouble is narrative: nobody
really knows what to do with them. One long-mooted idea was to shoot Irvine
Welsh’s Porno, Trainspotting’s scabrous literary sequel, which would surely
have been more challenging to adapt (and watch), but would have handed Boyle a
backbone the new film doesn’t have. Instead, he gets a Hodgepodge: scraps of
Porno and offcuts of Trainspotting, assembled by writer John Hodge into a
low-stakes caper about the boys’ attempts to open a sauna.
Unusually
hesitant, Boyle casts around, applying Snapchat filters here, would-be choice
indie cuts there, trying to make either the comedy or drama resonate as it once
did. Yet the film continually ambles past pressing themes (gentrification,
Scottish nationalism), opening promising plot doors it promptly slams shut again,
offering barely a glimpse of those (female) characters who might have provided
fresh perspectives on these four wee lads. It’s a very middle-aged endeavour, forever
entering a room only to forget why it’s there.
Those
passages that do work find Hodge digging his heels in and setting these characters
to interrogate the actions of their younger, venal selves; there’s obvious
poignancy in the contrast between the fresh-faced junkies of yore and their
regretful latter-day incarnations. Yet when Bremner catches a glimpse of the
young McGregor haring down Princes Street, it serves only as a chastening
reminder of how urgent the original was, and how aimless and torpid the new
movie feels.
Only belatedly
do you sense everyone moving in the same direction, but what T2 finally commits
to is replaying the hits at a different speed: cue a gloomier Choose Life
monologue, an extended toilet scene, Renton tumbling over the bonnet of a car from
behind. In such moments, the generally forward-thinking Boyle retreats into that
nostalgic fan service corporate entertainments like Jurassic World now trade in
– hence T2’s ending, striving vainly to make a step backwards seem celebratory
in some way.
If the first
Trainspotting could be read in hindsight as a scrappy social mobility fable,
indicative of the Blair years ahead, T2 finds everybody on screen muddling
through in reduced circumstances, which may itself be a sign of the times. Either
way, Boyle’s usual pep and vitality – that lust for life that’s previously
yanked us past all manner of script problems and existential crises – looks to
have waned here: T2 sent me out into a cold night feeling awfully old and sad.
Aren’t Januarys bleak enough already?
T2: Trainspotting is now showing in
cinemas nationwide.
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