Review of Ecstasy (2011) by Ola G — 19 Mar 2013

Lloyd Buist (Adam Sinclair), a drug addict ows a serious amount of money to the shady Solo (Carlo Rota). While Lloyd and his friends are out of control with drugs and partying, he must fulfill his "karmic" debt with Solo and is forced to smuggle drugs from Amsterdam to Edinburgh. Frustrated with her boring middle class and loveless marriage, Heather Thompson (Kristin Kreuk) seeks a change in her life. And when she meets Lloyd at a club, she finds just that change. Heather falls hard for Lloyd despite the fact that most of their time spent together is under the influence of illicit substances. As they experiment with this new lifestyle, they are faced with the question of whether they love their drugs, each other, or are just drugged into loving each other. After a while, Heather begins to doubt the veracity of Lloyd's feelings for her, wondering if it might not be the effect of the drugs after all. When Lloyd almost dies after a drug smuggling operation goes terribly wrong and faces the possibility of losing Heather, he decides to turn his life around, and he finds that natural highs might be the best of all. He wants to change, but first he must deal with Solo...

When I saw the trailer to this I felt a strong negative feeling. Everything connected to Irvine Welsh and his books in a cinematic way will always be compared to Danny Boyle´s excellent movieversion of "Trainspotting". "Ecstasy" is not even close. Eddie Harrison of The List stated that "... this is most definitely not Irvine Welsh's Ecstasy, but an agonisingly watered-down imitation, a long, languid come-down after the frenetic buzz of Trainspotting." Which is pretty much what it is. The production is uneven and you never feel really emotionally moved by anything that happens on the screen. The ugliness of drugs isn´t communicated in a satisfying way in my opinion. And the balance between the drugs/effects and the love story between Lloyd and Heather doesn´t work, thus the storyline becomes scattered. The idea of hiring Mark Blamire, the award winning designer who was also involved with the original marketing campaign of Trainspotting, to do the graphic design and marketing for Irvine Welsh's Ecstasy didn´t work out either, due to the fact that the result feels like a diluted version of the striking graphic material for "Trainspotting". I am more excited about the fact that Danny Boyle is more of less working on the follow up to "Trainspotting" with the whole original ensemble.