Cook up and tie off—T2, the long-awaited sequel to Danny Boyle’s British black comedy Trainspotting, opens this weekend. Released in 1996, Trainspotting arrived in the U.S. as domestic heroin use was peaking, and its tale of five directionless Edinburgh lads, some of them avid junkies, connected with indie filmgoers like a spike into the main line. No movie ever made me want to do the drug more, not after Boyle married it to the irresistible bomp-bomp-bomp, bomp-bomp-ba-bomp of Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life.” Who could forget the image of young Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) standing alone in his room, eyes shut, smoke in hand, tipping backward in sheer pleasure as the dope washes over him? “Take the best orgasm you ever had, multiply it by a thousand, and you’re still nowhere near it,” he enthuses in one of his frequent voice-overs. Interviewed for a making-of video, Boyle cited this celebration of the drug experience as a virtue of Irvine Welsh’s source novel: “It doesn’t flinch to tell you what can happen to you, but it also tells you how extraordinary these drugs can be.”
Bad sequels try to re-create the original movie; good ones explore its narrative consequences. That’s certainly the case with T2 when Mark returns to Edinburgh to visit his widowed father, atone for missing his mother’s death and burial, and face the music with his former friends and accomplices. Time hasn’t been kind to the old crew: Spud is unemployed and still mired in heroin addiction, and Sick Boy divides his time between running his late aunt’s desolate pub and blackmailing errant husbands with the help of his Bulgarian prostitute girlfriend, Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova). Begbie has spent the last 20 years incarcerated, but manages to escape, and once he learns that Mark has come back to town, he vows revenge. But Mark hasn’t done much better than the others: as he confesses to Sick Boy, his wife back in Amsterdam has left him, his business partners have elbowed him out of their company, and doctors have just inserted a metal stent into his left coronary artery. “I’m 46 years old,” he tells Sick Boy, “and I’m fucked!”
Directed by Danny Boyle
