Susan Granger’s review of “T2: Trainspotting” (Columbia/Sony)
Back in 1996, Scottish filmmaker Danny Boyle celebrated sneering, rebellious, drug-drenched youth in “Trainspotting.” In this sequel, Ewan McGregor and the Leith lads trip into middle-age.
Re-visiting the same characters 20 years later, it recalls how Mark Renton (McGregor) ripped off his friends in a lucrative drug deal. Apparently, he took the money and fled to Amsterdam, where he kicked his heroin habit and plunged into respectability, including a failed marriage.
When Renton returns to Edinburgh after his mother’s death, only the sniveling junkie, Spud (Ewen Bremner), who is estranged from his wife and child, welcomes him. Spud’s best scene is when he explains to a support group why he feels that the biggest obstacle to sobriety is daylight savings time.
Feigning friendship, Simon (Jonny Lee Miller) – a.k.a. Sick Boy – remains furious about Renton’s betrayal. Attempting to atone for his sins, Renton tries to help him and his Bulgarian prostitute partner, Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova), turn the decrepit family pub into an upscale brothel by scamming a small European Union development grant.
And the ill-tempered, impotent psychopath, Begbie (Robert Carlisle), has escaped from prison, determined to wreak revenge.
Scripted by Johnny Hodge and directed by Danny Boyle as a character study, it’s filled not only with striking images, inducing nostalgia, but also a contemporary commentary on urban gentrification, noting the uneasy rise of the populist movement that fueled Brexit.
Although they’d toyed unsuccessfully with Irvine Welsh’s 2002 follow-up book “Porno,” the idea of a reunion ignited in mid-2015, when Boyle bumped into Ewan McGregor in a London pub, where they began patching up a feud that began when Boyle cast Leonardo DiCaprio, instead of McGregor, in his big budget adaptation of “The Beach.”
“I decided enough is enough,” admits McGregor. “And I wanted to work with Danny again.”
Not to disappoint, Boyle revives Renton’s “choose life” speech, focusing the rant on the brutality of social media and the dispiriting economy.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “T2: Trainspotting” is a bitterly cynical 5, redundantly evoking regret and acceptance.
