[yasr_overall_rating]
After 20 years abroad, Mark Renton returns to Scotland and reunites with his old friends, Sick Boy, Spud, and Begbie.
I didn’t see the original “Trainspotting” upon its initial release back in 1996, I watched it on VHS a few years later and I was somewhat disappointed with it. Like “Pulp Fiction” before it, the universal praise showered upon both movies made my viewing of them somewhat anticlimactic. I watched it again about ten years later and have to admit, I was able to appreciate it even more. But even with that appreciation, I was never blown away by it. The acting was admirable and Danny Boyle’s direction was praiseworthy but looking back on it now, I realize that the characters and scenarios throughout were too similar to my life back in Dublin. While the events of the film took place in Edinburgh, Scotland, the overall culture there was not much different from my hometown of Dublin so watching the events transpiring in the story reminded me a lot of my youth, something I was trying to move on from. I have a bigger appreciation for “T2 Trainspotting” as it takes place twenty years later and the characters, for the most part, like myself, have matured with age.
At the end of the first movie, Mark (Ewan McGregor) took £16,000 that he and his friends Simon (Jonny Lee Miller), Spud (Ewen Bremner) and Begbie (Robert Carlyle) received after selling a bunch of heroin to a drug dealer and then disappeared. Twenty years later, he returns to Edinburgh, having spent most of his time in Amsterdam, now wanting to reconnect with his old friends but very wary that they might still hold a grudge against him for what he did. He meets Simon, who now runs a pub named Port Sunshine which was left to him by his aunt and who wants to turn it into a brothel so his girlfriend Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova) can be the Madam who operates it. Initially, things don’t go well and the two wind up in a fist fight but after getting it out of their system, Simon tells Mark about his plan for his pub and he agrees to help him. Mark visits Spud at his flat, who is just about to end his life by self-asphyxiation but Mark intervenes and saves him, much to Spud’s annoyance. Addicted to heroin, and not being able to hold down a job, he is barred from seeing his girlfriend and son and feels like he has nothing worth living for.
Begbie is in prison and having just been denied parole for the umpteenth time, he returns to his cell and has his cellmate stab him so he will be hospitalized. Once there, he manages to trick the guard watching over him and escapes, reuniting with his wife and son, keeping a very low profile and returning to a life of crime. As Mark and Spud come together to help Simon transform his dilapidated old pub into a new “leisure club,” successfully managing to acquire a loan of £100,000 in the process, Begbie discovers that Mark is back in town and having once killed a man because he was reminded of him, he sets out for Port Sunshine, where all four friends will be reunited, one last time.
There has been a lot of anticipation for this film and I think the fans, for the most part, will be pleasantly surprised. I related to many of the characters as they were able to mature and move on with their lives but especially Mark, a huge junkie in his youth, who successfully turned his life around, getting off the drugs, marrying, and working for a thriving business which allowed him to travel the world. Fans of the first movie, like the characters in it, will have moved on with their lives too, accompanying Mark, Simon, Spud, and Begbie in the process but both films await new generations coming up behind us. For some, “T2” may not live up to the expectations of the first movie because for them, they can simply watch both films back to back in one sitting, but for those of us who saw the first movie twenty years ago, we had to wait this long for the sequel and it was well worth the wait. Director Danny Boyle is in top form and in watching the film, it’s great to see that he has matured over the years too, not as frenetic in his filmmaking techniques as he once was, grounding the story more in reality. By the end of the movie, the characters and their story arcs had come full circle, their narratives being fully realized, and here’s hoping all involved won’t feel the need to make “T3” twenty years from now because honestly, Mark, Simon, Spud, and Begbie’s stories have been told.
In theaters March 31st
