T2 Trainspotting (2017)

T2 Trainspotting (2017)

IMDB Rating : 7.7/10 (as on 23.03.2017)

First there was an opportunity......then there was a betrayal. Twenty years have gone by. Much has changed but just as much remains the same. Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) returns to the only place he can ever call home. They are waiting for him: Spud (Ewen Bremner), Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), and Begbie (Robert Carlyle). Other old friends are waiting too: sorrow, loss, joy, vengeance, hatred, friendship, love, longing, fear, regret, diamorphine, self-destruction and mortal danger, they are all lined up to welcome him, ready to join the dance

Director: Danny Boyle

Writers: John Hodge, Irvine Welsh (novels)

Stars: Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller

R | 1h 57min | Drama

IMDB link Here

 Movie Rating ★★★★☆  

 Still in a class A of their own

There are few cinema images more iconic than the sight of Ewan McGregor’s feet hitting the ground running to the frantic drumbeats of Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life in the opening moments of Trainspotting, or the sound of a poppy T-shirt slogan (“Choose life”) being turned into a scabrous countercultural call to arms. Both are cheekily revisited in T2 Trainspotting, the long-awaited (or perhaps feared?) sequel that catches up with novelist Irvine Welsh’s antiheroes two decades later, and finds them ravaged not so much by heroin as by age, emasculation and an air of disappointment.

Drawing on both Welsh’s 1993 novel and its 2002 sequel, Porno, returning screenwriter John Hodge forges new narrative paths, remembering the glory days of yore without becoming what Simon calls “a tourist in your own youth”. The story may be driven by extortion, prostitution, addiction and even Death Wish-style revenge, but its primary concerns are friendship and memory (recurrent Boyle themes), with editor Jon Harris shuffling time frames like playing cards, old knaves coming face to face with new kings and queens, the latter in the shape of Anjela Nedyalkova’s enigmatic Veronika.

The real triumph of the original Trainspotting was that it gave vibrant voice to protagonists who would elsewhere be written off as deadbeats, turning them into empowered characters rather than downtrodden victims. The same is true of the sequel, nowhere more so than in the character of Spud, who gradually becomes the true heart of the drama, the author of his own story. Bremner is just terrific in the role, his Keatonesque physicality perfectly capturing Spud’s blend of fragility and resilience, finding hidden depths beneath the defensively gormless facade. Like the movie itself, Spud can be both hilarious and heartbreaking; you want to hug him, even when his face is explosively splattered with vomit.

Visually, T2 reminds us that Boyle comes from a rebellious lineage of British cinema that can be traced back through Nicolas Roeg and Ken Russell to the classic films of Powell and Pressburger (the latter the grandfather of Trainspotting producer Andrew Macdonald). Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle quotes affectionately from his predecessor Brian Tufano’s kinetic playbook, and the bold colour schemes of Kave Quinn’s original production designs haunt the new locations. Yet this new movie retains a distinctly modern edge even as it looks back to the future. On the soundtrack, Underworld’s Rick Smith provides “original score and needle drops”, which blend altered fragments of old favourites with newer offerings from the likes of Young Fathers, High Contrast and Wolf Alice.

How T2 will play to younger audiences who didn’t grow up with the 1996 original is anyone’s guess. It’s hardly likely to become a touchstone text for a new generation of cinemagoers. But from the perspective of a fiftysomething film fan who was shaken up by Trainspotting all those years ago, it’s enough that the opportunity for this class reunion has not become a betrayal.

Read full review at The Guardian

Movie Rating ★★★☆☆  

Danny Boyle's sequel is more than just a trip down memory lane

Why go back? That’s a question any worthwhile sequel has to answer convincingly – let alone a two-decades-later follow-up a film so immediately iconic, it re-energised British cinema over the course of its opening credits.

The answer offered by Danny Boyle’s T2 Trainspotting is the same one any of us might give before a protracted session of nostalgic navel-gazing: first to work out who we are, and second to understand why we aren’t where we’d expected to be.

Back in 1996, in a monologue almost every teenager in Britain could recite from memory, Trainspotting’s gallery of junkies and rogues proudly and raucously chose not to choose life. But today, all have come to terms with the gnawing possibility that life may have in fact not chosen them.

Their fortunes have been, at best, mixed: Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) has been trying to kick-start a new life in Amsterdam, while the psychopathic Francis Begbie (Robert Carlysle) has passed the time in HMP Edinburgh, having served 20 years and counting for murder.

The new film, which like the first was scripted by John Hodge, is loosely based on Irvine Welsh’s 2002 novel Porno, and has finally arrived after eight years of rewrites and the seemingly arduous process of reuniting its original cast (which involved smoothing over Boyle and McGregor’s decade-long estrangement.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that Miller hasn’t oozed this much star power since the original film – at once slippery and magnetic, he’s T2’s dramatic linchpin, at least more so than McGregor, who brings fine comic timing, the McGregor Looks and a rousing monologue (an update of you-know-what), but tends to be a helping hand in other people’s stories. Happily, Bremner is still a pathos-tightened knot of ears and knees, and though Carlyle is forced to swing from comic relief to villain a little too broadly, he spits every line with bile-flecked commitment.

Speaking of bile, it’s just one of the grim fluids Boyle liberally splashes around the screen: others include blood, urine and Fanta. The film’s texture is primo scuzz with extra grain, and it visually meshes with the original with impressive seamlessness. (There are lots of clips.)

Like the original, T2 is happy enough spending time with its characters whatever they get up to. Very little that happens in the film seems to affect where it’s going, and the few things that do feel dashed off, almost as an afterthought. It’s also littered with callbacks to the first film – some as stirring as they are subtle, others exasperatingly cute.

There’s no chance of its successor matching that legacy, but it won’t tarnish it either: though the film feeds on its forerunner, it’s worthwhile on its own terms. Who knows, perhaps it’s the start of a tradition: think Richard Linklater’s Before… romances with class A drugs. T3, Friday 29th January, 2038? Pencil it in your diary now.

Read Full review at Telegraph

Director Danny Boyle's only film to crack $50 million in North America remains the Oscar juggernaut Slumdog Millionaire — his last two outings, Trance (2013) and Steve Jobs (2015), both underperformed — and T2 will do well to match the original's haul of $16 million ($33 million at today's prices).

The fact that there's double that chronological gap between the two films propels the characters more squarely into middle-age, though the ravages of time have been conspicuously kind to the formerly strung-out junkie Renton and the not-so-sick Simon alike. The picture is at its strongest when dealing with the volatile, unpredictable relationship between the two — which hovers between rancorous friction and knockabout affection — with McGregor and Miller clearly relishing the opportunity to relive past glories.

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).

Little of this will matter to the many devoted acolytes of Trainspotting, of course, which was a genuine phenomenon in its day. Oscar-nominated for best adapted screenplay, it was even ranked in a 1999 BFI survey among the 10 best British films ever made — beating out The Bridge on the River Kwai, If... and The Ladykillers. Devotees will doubtless be happy just to spend more time with these vividly remembered characters for the first time in so very long, two hours of wallowing happily and shamelessly — but counterproductively — in nostalgia.

Boyle, working with editor Jon Harris, interpolates myriad fleeting clips from the original alongside incidents, images and soundtrack choices which hark back explicitly to the first installment. But such constant memory-jogging only draws into cumulatively sharper relief the fundamental gulf in quality between the two films, and means that T2 never threatens to find its own distinctive voice.

Trainspotting, while no all-time classic, remains a bracingly and briskly opportunistic zeitgeist-surf through a time when the United Kingdom and Scotland were — after years of Conservative government — on the cusp of emerging into a new political and social era personified by PM-in-waiting Tony Blair. Twenty one years later, T2 Trainspotting has zero to say about how all that turned out, and only cursorily engages with what's going on now — a showy, self-consciously verbose "Choose Life" midpoint monologue from Renton (complete with post-synched audio) notwithstanding.

In the wake of last summer's epochal Brexit vote, and with Scottish independence prospects causing much national soul-searching, Boyle's picture — whose third act pivots on a European Union funding application — already feels instantly and strangely dated. A missed opportunity on multiple levels, T2 is stylistically an overwrought rehash which relies heavily on over-caffeinated camerawork and flashy effects (cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle's trademark gritty flair is overwhelmed by a flurry of Dutch angles and freeze-frames) to distract us from its essential paucity of raison d'etre. Welsh's literary creations move in a scatological realm of ickily spilt bodily fluids; in such terms the film can perhaps be compared to an eager-to-please dog who knows only old tricks, contentedly licking up his own vomit.

Read Full review at Hollywood reporter

Time to Pay the Piper

Ghosts of the past, both literal and figurative, haunt “T2 Trainspotting,” Danny Boyle’s droll and wistful return to the Scottish reprobates who, 21 years ago in “Trainspotting,” made heroin addiction a blast and bodily waste a metaphor for squandered lives.

Excremental flourishes notwithstanding, that gloriously scabrous picture also kick-started the careers of its director and stars, most of whom are back to illustrate the consequences of a misspent youth.

Mr. Boyle wisely doesn’t try to surpass, or even repeat, the mad, frenetic rhythms of the original. Gone is the druggy propulsiveness, the ecstasy of the high that injected such improbable joy into those wretched, long-ago lives. In its place is a more cautious, altogether creakier energy, one that touchingly mirrors the emotional and physical states of men who are neither as spry nor as carefree as their younger selves. Euphoria has faded, and disappointment and disillusion have moved in.

But while “T2” might be middle-aged, it’s very far from moribund, the despondent base notes shouldering a story of revenge and regret, amity and acceptance. Orchestrating an orgy of nostalgia — the train-patterned wallpaper in a childhood bedroom; scattered flashbacks to the men’s earlier capers — Mr. Boyle reprises the dodgy camera angles and tricky visuals that beckon us back to the first film with shameless deliberation.

This time, though, their purpose is more poignant. Playing with memory — the characters’ and our own — allows Mr. Boyle and his cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, to conjure some of the movie’s loveliest, most melancholy images: the smudged shape of Renton’s dead mother sitting at her kitchen table; Spud detoxing on the floor of his crummy apartment, his anguished shadow looming, “Nosferatu”-like, above him.

If all this sounds unbearably depressing, be cheered. “T2” never strays too far from laughs, most memorably in an exhilarating sequence that sends Renton and Simon to plunder a private club where partying Protestants belt out sectarian ditties. Leading the throng in a hastily composed anti-Catholic refrain, the two have never seemed so exultantly alive.

Aside from a warmly stabilizing performance by Anjela Nedyalkova as Veronika, a Bulgarian prostitute and Simon’s business partner, the film’s women are barely seen and quietly worn down. Kelly Macdonald reappears as a successful, adult version of the schoolgirl Renton once deflowered, but the light in her eyes has gone out. Similarly, Spud’s girlfriend (Shirley Henderson) and Begbie’s wife (Pauline Turner) pop in only briefly, their faces betraying decades of emotional strain.

It’s fitting, then, that Veronika — the only character untouched by the original movie’s damaged universe — should be the catalyst for this picture’s ouroboros-style ending. As Spud fends off his cravings by scribbling the stories of his youth, one habit substitutes for another and we are reminded of how little we change. And how much we sometimes wish that we could.

Read Full review at New York Times

It's hard to believe it's been more than 20 years since the original Trainspotting came along, sending the careers of Danny Boyle, Ewan McGregor and co soaring in a blaze of Iggy-Pop-tastic glory and spawning the poster and catchphrase that became a student staple during the late 90s. But reviving such a seminal movie is risky, and when news of the sequel broke there were many who wondered whether it was an act of genius or madness. Luckily I've got good news for you: it's a risk that's more than paid off.

Fast-forward to the present day and Renton (McGregor) is back in Scotland, nervous about the reception that awaits after he fleeced his friends at the end of the previous film. While Spud (Ewen Bremner) is still battling the drugs, Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) has turned his attention to other vices, with the help of his seductive new girlfriend Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova). Meanwhile Begbie (Robert Carlyle) is desperate to get out of jail, dreaming of the day he can seek revenge on Renton for the betrayal he can't forgive or forget.

Without wishing to give too much away, this is a modern, funny, gripping and poignant piece of cinema, straddling the fine line between subtle nods to nostalgia and fresh updates for a new millennium (including a twist on the 'Choose life' monologue for the Insta-age). All four of the main stars recapture their characters with confidence, but a special mention must go to Carlyle for his standout turn here, confirming Begbie's place as one of the most memorable sociopaths ever seen on screen.

The soundtrack isn't quite as iconic as before, but it's still pretty decent, and the plot is arguably more intriguing now that the former friends no longer know who they can trust. Will Renton get his comeuppance? Will Spud kick the habit? And will we ever find out what happened to Kelly Macdonald's Diane?

Read Full review at  Daily Mail