Tropic Sprockets / T2 Trainspotting

Tropic Sprockets / T2 Trainspotting

By Ian Brockway

The uncompromising and prismatic Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, Steve Jobs) scores with “T2 Trainspotting,” a sequel to the misadventures of those quirky heroin addicts Renton, Sick Boy and Spud. This chapter is just as colorful as the first film in 1996 and better still, just as darkly humored. This outing has the added quality of being pensive and haunting, thick with circumstance and the dilemma of the passing of time. Through it all runs the desire of wanting to recapture the past when the trio made a kind of Clockwork Orange crew for the heroin set: young, amoral and without a care.

Renton (Ewan McGregor) has returned to Edinburgh after 20 years, in the hopes of going straight. Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) has promised his new girlfriend Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova) a sauna business and blackmails folks on the side. Spud (Ewen Bremner) is still hardcore and his relationship with Gail and Fergus has iced over. Meanwhile Begbie (Robert Carlyle) remains as violent as ever and is serving a 25 year sentence.

Renton visits his pals and finds that not much has changed. Spud tries to kill himself and is saved by Renton just in time. Sick is inwardly consumed with a toxic resentment but his yen for revenge is eclipsed by his macho lust for Veronika and he wants money. Renton proposes petitioning the EU for a fake resort in addition to a smooth pickpocket venture.

These characters remain compelling and flavorfully flawed despite their older appearance. Their undaunted perversity thankfully remains intact, along with the psychedelic innocence that has given each frame of the original film iconic status.

Director Boyle’s lysergic acid pyrotechnics are well known and here they are again: florid and flush colors eye-popping with ecstasy, yet now they are laced with gray in the slowness of melancholy and a slightly different rhythm. Events are just as bleak, black and as comic as ever. Begbie is overwhelmed with such rage that he appears ridiculous.

Fans of gallows humor will be delighted. This sequel highlights once more the intoxications and pitfalls of unbridled lust. The cleverness of “T2 Trainspotting” is that it does not force, it simply shows these people as they are: grown up kids still stuck in a confused and kaliedoscopic rave of revenge.

These desires are never mean spirited however. The final shot of Renton doing his beloved dance to Iggy Pop brims with a druggy nostalgia and wild cheer, making every past, tri-colored transgression new again.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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