'Trainspotting' Sequel 'T2 Trainspotting' Reviews
Since 1996's Trainspotting, Danny Boyle's had an eclectic directing career — from 28 Days Later to Slumdog Millionaire to Steve Jobs, he's hopped genre and sentiment with ease. Was it a smart decision to finally make a sequel?
Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller, Ewen Bremner, and Robert Carlisle all return for T2 Trainspotting alongside screenwriter John Hodge. The film opens in US theaters on March 17th after a January premiere in the UK. Here's what reviews have to say about Boyle's follow-up:
The Story Follows The Edinburgh Boys 20 Years Later
Amazingly, they are all still alive. Renton (Ewan McGregor) has been living drug-free in Amsterdam for the past 20 years, but is returning to Edinburgh following his mother's death. The hapless Spud (Ewen Bremner) has been trying and failing to stay away from heroin, losing touch with a wife and son in the process. Begbie (Robert Carlyle) has been in prison, where his waistline, his moustache and his violent streak have all expanded. And Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) has been snorting cocaine, running his aunt's grotty pub, and blackmailing the clients of a Bulgarian prostitute (Anjela Nedyalkova).
[BBC]
Very little of these have anything to do with Irvine Welsh's very fine novel Porno, upon which the film is nominally part-based — and which appeared in print 13 years ago, just a decade after Welsh's generation-defining bestseller Trainspotting came out.
It Looks To The Past Instead Of Commenting On Today
Where "Trainspotting's" dive into the void was targeted, bristling with snarky anger at a Conservative system that provided few lifelines, "T2" — despite landing in a Britain once more under divisive Tory rule — is mostly content to let its characters alternately indulge and excoriate themselves.
[Variety]
It's as if Boyle hasn't got quite enough confidence in the script or the performers; his energy as a director sometimes hampers his vision as an artist. And while the first film somehow captured, defined and shaped the mid-90s zeitgeist of Brit-pop and dance culture, of New Labour and a new wave of British cinema, you can't help feel that "T2 Trainspotting" misses any such opportunity, particularly as it was shooting during the Brexit vote and now appears on the
eve of Donald Trump marching into the White House. Unless you perceive the zeitgeist now being all about disappointment, which, all things considered, it may well be.
[The Wrap]
There Are Cameos Sprinkled In… To A Fault
But it is weirdly moving when Renton is once again reunited with his laconic and dignified dad — a welcome cameo for James Cosmo — and then to go back into that boyhood bedroom which has been kept exactly as it was: a creepily well judged touch of necrophiliac fidelity to the past.
Women are very much on the sidelines, even more so than in Trainspotting: The terrific Shirley Henderson has insultingly little to do as Spud's long-suffering girlfriend Gail, while Boardwalk Empire's Kelly Macdonald — whose sparklingly auspicious acting debut back in 1996 was as Renton's wise-beyond-her-years schoolgirl girlfriend Diane — pops up for a one-scene, two-minute cameo (which nevertheless somehow nabs her fifth billing).
The Movie Isn't Without Some Of Boyle's Cinematic Flair
Like the original, 'T2 Trainspotting' is a winning mix of low living and high jinx, a stylized spin on real life. Music is just as important, and there are familiar tunes, but the tone is less youthful and more maudlin. It's a darker film, with less humour (although there's a brilliant comic scene in a Unionist club), and it's a little grander: the photography is more epic, the look more grown-up, although there's a familiar anarchy to the visuals.
[TimeOut]
T2 comes singing to life after Renton and Sick Boy's first score, as they're hoovering up rails of coke and talking over each other so furiously that Boyle decides to subtitle the exchange in quick-crashing waves of evaporating text. (Likewise, the single episode of heroin-relapse is a cracker, which might make you wonder whether the sequel to a film about dopers should've maybe included more, you know, dope.)
It's Either A Good Middle-Age Film Or A Nostalgic Mess
Sometimes, the film's addiction to nostalgia spirals out of control. When Renton updates his "Choose life" monologue, for instance, it's one fix too many. But, in general, the meanderings down memory lane are genuinely moving: Trainspotting and T2 deserve to sit next to Richard Linklater's Before trilogy and Truffaut's Adventures of Antoine Doinel in a file marked Bittersweet Chronicles of How We Grow Up and Grow Old.
[BBC]
As happens at any reunion with long-absent peers, however, a certain awkward silence can't help but sink in. "T2," for all its noise and neon, has little to say to fill it.
[Variety]
TL;DR
T2 isn't as good as T1: it is a little too long and unwinds a bit into caper sentimentality, broad comedy and self-mythologising. But it has the same punchy energy, the same defiant pessimism, and there's nothing around like it.
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