T2 Trainspotting
FILM REVIEW
T2 Trainspotting
Danny Boyle’s punchy sequel to Trainspotting is a nostalgia-hit
★★★★☆
Twenty years after Trainspotting, you might be hoping for another hit of cinematic heroin, but T2 is more a black comic take on a 12-step recovery programme for middle-aged men who are, as the film notes, “tourists in their own youth’’. That said, Danny Boyle’s long-awaited sequel is punchy, scabrous and riffs smartly off the original. But it also digs deeper into the troubled psyches of Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie.
Twenty years after Trainspotting, you might be hoping for another hit of cinematic heroin, but T2 is more a black comic take on a 12-step recovery programme for middle-aged men who are, as the film notes, “tourists in their own youth’’. That said, Danny Boyle’s long-awaited sequel is punchy, scabrous and riffs smartly off the original. But it also digs deeper into the troubled psyches of Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie.
Ewan McGregor returns as Renton, roaring an updated anthem of anger: “Choose life, choose Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and hope that someone somewhere cares . . . Choose reality TV, slut shaming, revenge porn. Choose a zero-hour contract, a two-hour journey to work, and choose the same for your kids only worse.” We see him racing through the streets of Edinburgh. Except now he’s 46 — and on a tram.
That opening scene from the original film, when Renton and Spud (Ewen Bremner) ran joyously down Princes Street after a spate of shoplifting, thrumming to Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life, gets a nostalgic nod when the older Renton is chased, bounces over the bonnet of a car, and rises up with that same old lunatic grin on his face.
Boyle’s film-making is so rich in images that it’s hard to keep up
You may remember that Renton disappeared at the end of the 1996 original to Amsterdam with a pile of his mates’ ill-gotten drugs cash. But the siren call of Edinburgh and his friends Spud and Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) brings him home — and into the eternally psychotic and unpredictable orbit of Franco Begbie (Robert Carlyle) who has just released himself from prison and is still riled by Renton’s betrayal.
Spud looks as if he has recently been dug up from the grave, and is still battling heroin addiction after an attempt to stay clean and employed was foxed by Daylight Saving Time, something a junkie might not clock. Renton, however, has prospered (perhaps McGregor has too much of a healthy Hollywood glow), and he’s a Lycra-clad jogger now while his friends are in terminal decline, as are large parts of Leith where Sick Boy now runs his aunt’s Port Sunshine pub, just beyond the reach of gentrification. At least he has a sideline in brothels and blackmail.
The reunion of the friends erupts in electric violence, featuring a bell, a pool cue and a shower of Irn-Bru, but later a precarious bromance develops between Sick Boy and Renton, who have the chemistry and comic timing of a hot Edinburgh Fringe double-act: the actors have really perfected their craft in the past two decades. It’s a joy to watch, particularly in one scream of a scene, when Renton and Sick Boy are forced to sing in a Protestant Orangemen’s club, belting out “No more Catholics!” to an appreciative audience.
In comparison, Bremner’s Spud seems too caricatured, all pop-eyed madness and strange tics, but Carlyle’s Begbie is as explosively menacing as ever, and his final assault pays tribute to the “Here’s Johnny” moment in The Shining. Kelly Macdonald, who played the underage schoolgirl Diane in the first film, is back in an all-too-short cameo as a brisk lawyer and ironically ticks Renton off for the youthfulness of his new friend Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova), a Bulgarian prostitute.
But the women’s parts are mere sidelines. What matters here is masculinity: being a player or a loser, a father or a failure, potent or impotent, and T2 cracks open that Scottish reserve with a sledgehammer (at one point literally). Talking of Scotland, I was keen to see if there would be a post-independence referendum update on Renton’s Trainspotting soliloquy: “Some hate the English. I don’t. They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers. Can’t even find a decent culture to be colonised by.” But Boyle revisits those same Scottish hills without any mention of politics in this new script written by John Hodge, partly based on the Irvine Welsh novel Porno.
Boyle’s film-making is so rich in images — saturated colours, surreal interludes, junkie perspectives, CCTV footage, old home videos — that it’s hard to keep up and it was only on a second viewing that I spotted footballer George Best’s giant face beamed on the side of a car.
The soundtrack is as throbbing, thrilling and omnipresent as the first: Underworld’s Born Slippy theme makes a return, along with the Prodigy remix of Lust for Life, plus there’s ironic use of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax, Lou Reed’s Perfect Day, and the Scottish ballad Caledonia.
While Trainspotting was fearless in its hedonism, the sequel tempers that hedonism with hurt. Like Boyhood or the television series Seven Up!, watching McGregor, Bremner, Carlyle and Miller grow 20 years older on screen is fascinating and convincing. But it also leaves the viewer with a nostalgic wrench of loss.
18, 117min
18, 117min
Trainspotting’s comeback kids
Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle and Ewen Bremner discuss how they came together for the sequel to Danny Boyle’s 1996 film
As you may have noticed, Trainspotting is back. It only took 20 years. As expected, this loose adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s 2002 novel, Porno, is a joyous free-form trip down musical memory lane, featuring Renton (Ewan McGregor, 45), Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller, 44), Begbie (Robert Carlyle, 55) and Spud (Ewen Bremner, 45), battling it out with one another, local mobsters, past demons and encroaching mortality. But why did it take so long to make? How did the cast get their mojo back? And, most crucial of all, why is it so unnervingly sad?
Enter the four leading actors. Effortless in one another’s company, they have a routine of sorts. McGregor handles the straight stuff, Carlyle adds gravitas, Bremner does soft and sweet, and Miller comes in with the quip, sending everyone into fits of giggles. It’s quite an act.
First, the question of the 20-year gap between movies, often credited to a falling-out between the director Danny Boyle and McGregor, after Boyle cast Leonardo DiCaprio instead of McGregor in The Beach. True?
Ewan McGregor The truth is that John Hodge [who wrote the screenplay for Trainspotting] wrote a version of Porno a few years after it came out and Danny didn’t send it to us because he didn’t think that it was good enough. The commonly held belief is that I was the one holding a sequel back, but I think the film found its time. In fact, it was really only after Danny and John, together with Irvine Welsh and the producers, went up to Edinburgh [in 2014] and spent a week there just brainstorming Porno that . . .
Jonny Lee Miller . . . I’ve often spent a few days brainstorming porno.
EM Well, it was after that week in Edinburgh that John came back and put pen to paper to write this blinding script.
Robert Carlyle Danny has always maintained that he wanted to wait until we were the actual age that we needed to be for the sequel. It would’ve been easy to put grey in the hair and wrinkles in the face, but I’ve got them now, and that life experience shows.
Ewan McGregor The truth is that John Hodge [who wrote the screenplay for Trainspotting] wrote a version of Porno a few years after it came out and Danny didn’t send it to us because he didn’t think that it was good enough. The commonly held belief is that I was the one holding a sequel back, but I think the film found its time. In fact, it was really only after Danny and John, together with Irvine Welsh and the producers, went up to Edinburgh [in 2014] and spent a week there just brainstorming Porno that . . .
Jonny Lee Miller . . . I’ve often spent a few days brainstorming porno.
EM Well, it was after that week in Edinburgh that John came back and put pen to paper to write this blinding script.
Robert Carlyle Danny has always maintained that he wanted to wait until we were the actual age that we needed to be for the sequel. It would’ve been easy to put grey in the hair and wrinkles in the face, but I’ve got them now, and that life experience shows.
Principal photography for the film began in March 2016 . . .
EM I was quite nervous coming up to it. How do I know that I’m going to find the thing that made me Renton 20 years ago? What if it doesn’t work? What if I let everybody down? But you slowly realise that these characters are in us, just as they are imprinted in the hearts and souls of all the people that love the movie. They’re alive. So when it came to playing him again, there’s something in me that’s still him.
RC They never really went away. Almost every week for the last 20 years, seriously, someone somewhere has come up to me and gone, “Begbie! Begbie!” And then they do the line. You know?
JLM “That lassie got glassed, and no cunt leaves here till I find out what cunt did it!”
RC That’s the one. And then they pose for a selfie.
EM I was quite nervous coming up to it. How do I know that I’m going to find the thing that made me Renton 20 years ago? What if it doesn’t work? What if I let everybody down? But you slowly realise that these characters are in us, just as they are imprinted in the hearts and souls of all the people that love the movie. They’re alive. So when it came to playing him again, there’s something in me that’s still him.
RC They never really went away. Almost every week for the last 20 years, seriously, someone somewhere has come up to me and gone, “Begbie! Begbie!” And then they do the line. You know?
JLM “That lassie got glassed, and no cunt leaves here till I find out what cunt did it!”
RC That’s the one. And then they pose for a selfie.
The new film is littered with stand-out scenes, often undercut with tenderness. Two key, contrasting moments are a painfully sweet scene of the grown up Renton dancing alone in his bedroom to Iggy Pop and a typically abrasive shot of Spud suddenly vomiting into a plastic bag sealed around his head. Discuss.
EM Danny told me about the dancing then and there in the bedroom set. The scene was written: “He comes in, puts on the record and lies back on the bed.” So I came on set ready for that, and then Danny comes over and whispers, “Do you think that, maybe, you could do a bit of dancing instead?” And I went, “OK”, and I did it, and there is something very lovely about it. When I saw it for the first time at the Edinburgh premiere, I was in bits. It just tipped me over the edge.
Ewen Bremner The vomiting scene didn’t go as planned. I ended up getting waterboarded with litres of cold vegetable soup. They were supposed to make it look like I was vomiting by using a compressed-air pump to shoot it out through a hidden pipe that I was holding in my teeth that went under a Band-Aid at the side of my face. But with the first one the pipe slipped, pointed up my nose and — bang! — it exploded up into my nose, and there was vegetable soup in my fucking sinuses for days. I was so nauseous. And they had to shoot it seven more times.
RC There’s something so Spud about that.
EM Danny told me about the dancing then and there in the bedroom set. The scene was written: “He comes in, puts on the record and lies back on the bed.” So I came on set ready for that, and then Danny comes over and whispers, “Do you think that, maybe, you could do a bit of dancing instead?” And I went, “OK”, and I did it, and there is something very lovely about it. When I saw it for the first time at the Edinburgh premiere, I was in bits. It just tipped me over the edge.
Ewen Bremner The vomiting scene didn’t go as planned. I ended up getting waterboarded with litres of cold vegetable soup. They were supposed to make it look like I was vomiting by using a compressed-air pump to shoot it out through a hidden pipe that I was holding in my teeth that went under a Band-Aid at the side of my face. But with the first one the pipe slipped, pointed up my nose and — bang! — it exploded up into my nose, and there was vegetable soup in my fucking sinuses for days. I was so nauseous. And they had to shoot it seven more times.
RC There’s something so Spud about that.
What about the women, or lack of? Controversially, a key player from the original, Kelly Macdonald’s Diane, has only one scene — as a successful lawyer. Besides Sick Boy’s sex-worker girlfriend Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova), women are almost entirely absent from the main on-screen action. JLM It’s difficult and not for us to say, but I think it’s intentional that Diane, even though she’s only in one scene, is the success. She’s a success because she’s not involved in the same f***ing nonsense as the guys. She’s not stuck in that world.
EM There was another storyline with her that was cut. She picks me up in her Mini and drives me back to her place, and I live in her apartment on her sofa for some nights. And there’s a lovely scene where I come down the corridor because I see the light coming out from underneath her door, because there’s a tension built up between us. I say to her, “Do you ever think about the past?” And she says, “No,” but you can tell that she does. But I think, in the edit, it detracted from the main story. It’ll be on the DVD extras.
RC When you’re making a film you’ve got to make choices. Look at the poster. There’s four guys on it and that’s who it’s about. It’s about this friendship they’ve had since children, and you follow that through.
EM There was another storyline with her that was cut. She picks me up in her Mini and drives me back to her place, and I live in her apartment on her sofa for some nights. And there’s a lovely scene where I come down the corridor because I see the light coming out from underneath her door, because there’s a tension built up between us. I say to her, “Do you ever think about the past?” And she says, “No,” but you can tell that she does. But I think, in the edit, it detracted from the main story. It’ll be on the DVD extras.
RC When you’re making a film you’ve got to make choices. Look at the poster. There’s four guys on it and that’s who it’s about. It’s about this friendship they’ve had since children, and you follow that through.
It’s a melancholic film suffused with sadness about ageing and lost youth. Did you know you were making a weepfest?RC I don’t think any of us had that feeling when we read the script or when we were doing it. But when I saw it, I cried. Because you know these guys so well, and for some bizarre reason you care about them.
EM Everyone at the premiere sat through till the end of the credits, and then there was this sad, heavy feeling. I think it’s a reflection on our own lives. It allows the audience to look back on their youth through the prism of these characters.
JLM If you’ve seen the first film as an audience member you are going to have some sort of emotional reaction, depending on the last 20 years that you’ve lived. That’s the point.
EM Making this film, and us all being back together again, has really focused the mind and memory back to that time. It’s moving for me and very emotional.
RC I hadn’t seen Ewan [McGregor] since we made the first film. It’s ridiculous because we get on so well. How does that happen? Split up in different parts of the world, doing different stuff. But I’m determined, this time, even if it’s just by email, to say, “How are you doing? How’s it going?” Just to keep up as friends. It’s different with Jonny and me. We have made a film together since then [1999’s Plunkett & Macleane].
JLM Yeah. He used to call me “Jonny Lee Me Alone”.
EM Everyone at the premiere sat through till the end of the credits, and then there was this sad, heavy feeling. I think it’s a reflection on our own lives. It allows the audience to look back on their youth through the prism of these characters.
JLM If you’ve seen the first film as an audience member you are going to have some sort of emotional reaction, depending on the last 20 years that you’ve lived. That’s the point.
EM Making this film, and us all being back together again, has really focused the mind and memory back to that time. It’s moving for me and very emotional.
RC I hadn’t seen Ewan [McGregor] since we made the first film. It’s ridiculous because we get on so well. How does that happen? Split up in different parts of the world, doing different stuff. But I’m determined, this time, even if it’s just by email, to say, “How are you doing? How’s it going?” Just to keep up as friends. It’s different with Jonny and me. We have made a film together since then [1999’s Plunkett & Macleane].
JLM Yeah. He used to call me “Jonny Lee Me Alone”.
The most intriguing thing about T2 Trainspotting is that it doesn’t close itself off from the possibility of another sequel. In fact, the characters are so comfortable together and their life circumstances so flexible that the development of another instalment would seem almost logical. So, what about the “f” word, franchise?
EM I dunno. It seems a bit too early to be talking about another one. Especially when this one took 20 years to make.
RC But there is another Welsh novel, The Blade Artist, that came out last year and focused on Begbie and his life. I’ve been speaking to Danny about it and trying to work out how we get the other guys into it. They do show up briefly in the book, so it would be interesting if we could knit all that together.
EB I would feel hugely trepidatious if they said that they want to make another one.
RC (mock huff) Fine. I’ll do it by myself then. And send you a ticket.
EM The truth is that T2 Trainspotting is not a traditional sequel. We didn’t do it after three years to remake the original movie and make money. So I don’t know if it’s in our natures to do Trainspotting 3. Although The Blade Artist is different. It’s a stand-alone thing.
JLM It’s basically Rogue One.
RC It’s only because I’m the best actor.
JLM It’s because you’re the oldest!
EM I dunno. It seems a bit too early to be talking about another one. Especially when this one took 20 years to make.
RC But there is another Welsh novel, The Blade Artist, that came out last year and focused on Begbie and his life. I’ve been speaking to Danny about it and trying to work out how we get the other guys into it. They do show up briefly in the book, so it would be interesting if we could knit all that together.
EB I would feel hugely trepidatious if they said that they want to make another one.
RC (mock huff) Fine. I’ll do it by myself then. And send you a ticket.
EM The truth is that T2 Trainspotting is not a traditional sequel. We didn’t do it after three years to remake the original movie and make money. So I don’t know if it’s in our natures to do Trainspotting 3. Although The Blade Artist is different. It’s a stand-alone thing.
JLM It’s basically Rogue One.
RC It’s only because I’m the best actor.
JLM It’s because you’re the oldest!
Finally, all four actors have, at various points in the past, noted that their Trainspotting characters are the ones that follow them around on a daily basis. Surely doing this film means that these characters are now cemented to their souls for ever, and will follow them to their graves?
RC That’ll do me.
EM I’m OK with that.
EB There’s always huge affection when people bring up Trainspotting, so that’s a good thing.
JLM This is the job! To create an impression on people. And if you’re lucky enough to do something that has the kind of impact that Trainspotting has, then you’d be an idiot not to appreciate it.
RC That’ll do me.
EM I’m OK with that.
EB There’s always huge affection when people bring up Trainspotting, so that’s a good thing.
JLM This is the job! To create an impression on people. And if you’re lucky enough to do something that has the kind of impact that Trainspotting has, then you’d be an idiot not to appreciate it.
ARTS
Trainspotting — the film that changed my life
As a young Scot, Hugo Rifkind found Danny Boyle’s 1996 film spoke directly to him (even if it did poke fun at his dad)
Among my extended family, there rumbles an unresolved argument about whether or not my cousin Jonny is in Trainspotting. Not Jonny Lee Miller. Different Jonny. This one was working in John Menzies on Princes Street, which is the shop out of which Ewan McGregor’s Renton bursts in the opening scenes. Employed as an extra, he maintains that you can see him, for about half a second, standing at a bus stop. Although we’ve all freeze-framed it, a million times, we’ve never quite been sure.
This is what Trainspotting was like, if you came from Edinburgh. Our city has never been a cultural backwater, but until then it was famed for Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Edinburgh Festival, but not yet its bohemian the Fringe and, oh my God, I’m falling asleep. You cannot know, you kids of London, Manchester and even Glasgow, how far from all things trendy and pop-culture we felt. Yet here was a thing, a great noisy orange thing, bursting from our shops and running down our streets. Suddenly it bestrode the world, and it sounded like us.
In Boyle’s hands, Welsh’s bitter nihilism becomes optimistic
Well. A bit like us. I am not so blind. I knew full well, even then, that Irvine Welsh’s story, of a Leith underbelly populated by skagheids and bampots, wasn’t really much to do with me. Still, Edinburgh was a stuffy city back then, and it was stuffy even if you, yourself, were a scion of that stuffiness. My friend Ali had given me the book of Trainspotting three years earlier, and it had been a revelation; an antidote to the hinterland of Georgian terraces and Faculties of Advocates that stretched out ahead of me, and felt like it always would. There’s even a bit in it (page 348, I just looked it up) where Sick Boy tries to sound posh by “disguising his voice, Malcolm Rifkind merchant-school style”. Aged 16, although proud of my dad, I was already pretty bored with people assuming I’d turn into him.
This was not just a book about heroin and despair, of which I mercifully knew nothing. It was also about another world I was just discovering, of nightlife and rebellion, and that classless spacey fraternity you’d find in God knows whose flat, at God knows which hour, after a night at God knows which club. Welsh’s characters, more to the point, were only rarely portrayed as the inevitable victims of their circumstances. “Choose life,” sneered Renton, with “life” meaning a mortgage and a career, and a “fucking big television”. For Renton and Sick Boy, if less so the rest, the whole point was that they’d seen that future — and yawned, and chosen not to. Any teenager can identify with that.
Even by the time the book came out, though, Welsh’s darker Edinburgh was already fading. The Aids epidemic was over and Leith, while hardly Morningside even to this day, was already becoming a budding property hotspot. Football violence, its second, neglected theme, was in sharp decline. Plus, nobody still listened to Iggy Pop. With the film, though, Danny Boyle shunted everything a generation along. “The world is changing, music is changing, even drugs are changing,” sighs Kelly Macdonald’s Diane. “You can’t stay in here all day dreaming about heroin and Ziggy Pop.” And then she adds, devastatingly: “He’s dead, anyway.”
Welsh’s Renton had shuffled around in shellsuits and donkey jackets, but McGregor’s dressed like me. They’ve mocked up a photo for this article, I know, but if they’d been able to find a real one they really needn’t have bothered. The 9st frame, the too-tight T-shirt, I had it all. The mid-1990s — post-recession but pre-Tony Blair — were not all about Britpop. There was another, concurrent youth culture going on and I probably spent more time in it. We wore combat trousers and trainers, danced to techno and drum ’n’ bass, and didn’t have mobile phones. Drugs were optional but everywhere, as Ecstasy, speed and hash. Nor, unlike Britpop, was it all about London. King’s Cross had an edge of it, true, but you could leap around in a club in Nottingham, Sheffield or even Edinburgh and never once feel like you were missing out. Perhaps it was just called “being a student”. Still, Trainspotting spoke to that world.
It was also very Scottish, and in a way you perhaps had to be Scottish to recognise it. Only after I left Edinburgh, for example, did I realise how violent traditional Scottish nightlife was. I have three scars on my mouth, one from a punch-up in the Grassmarket and the other two from a properly savage mugging in Holyrood Park. Boyle’s Trainspotting caught Scotland’s exasperation with all that — Welsh called it “swedging” — as seen by the way that Robert Carlyle’s psychotic Begbie was neither hero nor quite horror, but just this ever-present, enormous hassle.
Somehow, the film also tapped into a new sort of Scottishness, or perhaps helped to create it. It came, remember, a mere six months after Mel Gibson’s absurd, wonderful Braveheart, which even Alex Salmond credits with giving nationalism a shot in the arm. Trainspotting’s great tribal soliloquy, though, is anything but patriotic. “It’s shite being Scottish,” hollers Renton, shivering on a scenic mountainside. “We’re the lowest of the low! The scum of the fucking Earth!” On the page, for Welsh, this is pure, bitter, self-loathing nihilism. In Boyle’s hands, though, it somehow becomes both hilarious and optimistic; a clarion call that things need to change, but a new path must be found. Today, indeed, if you’ll find true progressive, civic nationalism anywhere in Scotland, you will find it in Leith. The rest of Edinburgh voted to remain part of the UK in 2014. Leith did not.
Watching Trainspotting again, odd as it might sound, I was surprised to see how much of it really is about heroin. Terrible things happen, almost everybody is horrible and doomed, and women only exist to take skag, nag, or shag. Boyle, though, bathes it all in sunshine, making it at once cartoonish and profound. It made me think again of his wonderful Olympic opening ceremony, which also managed to be everything and its opposite, all at once. Scene by scene, Trainspotting is a morbid horror show. Yet the overall vibe transcends that by a mile. It chooses life.
Welsh’s own later work has occasionally been patchy, but I’ve loved all of it. I had a pint with him in 2014, after a television debate on the eve of the independence referendum. I suspect he could tell how overawed I was. The moment that stays with me, though, is of the debate itself, in which I said only one thing, about the sense of ownership I’d immediately felt when I’d first moved to London and had launched myself into Camden’s DayGlo pop-nirvana bustle. Welsh, who was pro-independence, hadn’t had much more time to speak himself, but that was the point he wanted to talk about. In retrospect, it’s not so surprising that my urban sentimentality should have struck a chord. Probably, I got it from him.
I have read Porno, the book on which the new film is based. Frankly, I’ve no idea whether it will make a good movie or not. In a way, though, it doesn’t really matter. All I’ll need to hear is the clangy, reverb of Underworld’s Born Slippy and I’ll be 18 again, in my tiny T-shirt and combats, wild on life — and not just life — and shrieking the words. Although to be honest, like everybody else, I still don’t really know what they are.
CLASSIC FILM OF THE WEEK
Trainspotting (1996)
★★★★★
“Take the best orgasm you’ve ever had, multiply it by a thousand, and you’re still nowhere near it,” says Renton (Ewan McGregor), introducing the audience to the joys of heroin in Trainspotting. It’s 20 years since Renton cleaned up in both senses and since the sequel, T2 Trainspotting, opens this month, the original deserves a revisit. With scabrous wit, a scabby collection of reprobates and an addictive soundtrack, the dark comedy directed by Danny Boyle has constantly been cited in British top ten movie lists.
“Take the best orgasm you’ve ever had, multiply it by a thousand, and you’re still nowhere near it,” says Renton (Ewan McGregor), introducing the audience to the joys of heroin in Trainspotting. It’s 20 years since Renton cleaned up in both senses and since the sequel, T2 Trainspotting, opens this month, the original deserves a revisit. With scabrous wit, a scabby collection of reprobates and an addictive soundtrack, the dark comedy directed by Danny Boyle has constantly been cited in British top ten movie lists.
Based on Irvine Welsh’s novel, the film starts with Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life playing over that famous sequence of Renton doing a runner down the streets of Edinburgh, with his voiceover ranting: “Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career . . . but why would I want to do a thing like that?” Renton is part of a crew including bleached-blond Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), Spud (Ewen Bremner) and everyone’s favourite manic psycho Begbie (Robert Carlyle). There is also a breakthrough performance by Kelly Macdonald as the schoolgirl seductress Diane.
Boyle’s genius was to turn a hefty, complex book into a free-flowing kaleidoscopic ride: look out for his low camera angles in the drug dens, the monologue on Scotland, the surreal doll crawling the ceiling, and, of course, the vomitrocious and sadly unforgettable sequence in “the worst toilet in Scotland”. It will be fascinating to see what Boyle, now almost a member of the establishment after his people-pleasing Olympic opening ceremony, has done with T2.
18, 93min; on Netflix, DVD and Blu-ray
18, 93min; on Netflix, DVD and Blu-ray
Comments