Review of T2 Trainspotting (2017) by Annie T — 04 Apr 2017

Movie sequels are as commonplace today as Kardashian siblings, but few could have expected director Danny Boyle to revisit his 1996 cult classic about heroin-fueled delinquents raising hell in working-class Scotland twenty years later.

Even fewer would dare hope that this follow-up might actually be good, yet Boyle and the returning cast deliver a largely engrossing film that proves to be a worthy companion piece to the original. Whereas the first film offered a gritty yet oddly vibrant look at disaffected youth both succumbing to and fighting against their own moral depravity, T2 finds our merry hoodlums being dragged into middle-age kicking and screaming.

Having squandered what little promise laid before him in adulthood, a dejected Renton (Ewan McGregor) returns to Edinburgh and finds himself reverting to his old ways, thanks to former cohorts Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), Spud (Ewen Bremner) and the ever-psychotic Begbie (Robert Carlyse).

The film's slightly more subdued tone fits perfectly with the life stage of these characters: older yet not necessarily wiser, they spend less time clubbing and more time raging against both each other and their miserable lots in life.

While that may sound like a depressing night at the movies, rest assured that Boyle injects enough wicked fun to the proceedings to keep it from devolving into moroseness. [Renton and Sick Boy's visit to a Glasgow unionist pub, featuring a clumsy bit of musical improv and a kicker of a punchline, is a comedic highlight.

] The movie is not without a couple of blemishes: McGregor's spirited performance can't quite make up for the fact that his role as T2's chief protagonist feels slightly underwritten, and some of the movie's nods to its predecessor (particularly a revamped version of Renton's "Choose Life" riff) comes off slightly forced.

By and large, though, this is one twenty-year reunion well worth attending.