T2: Trainspotting

Here’s where Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” kicks in. We have to believe the four “heroes” of Trainspotting survived for another 20 years. This film tells us they did so we have to accept that, however improbable that may be. If we don’t there’s no movie — and that would be a loss. 

The sequel is a rewarding, touching return to those four fascinating Scottish outsiders and their varying attempts to escape their drug addictions. T2 retains the original exuberant nihilism. Renton’s exhortation parallels his first film’s opening: 

"Choose life. Choose Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and hope that someone, somewhere cares. Choose looking up old flames, wishing you'd done it all differently. And choose watching history repeat itself. Choose your future. Choose reality TV, slut shaming, revenge porn. Choose a zero-hour contract, a two hour journey to work. And choose the same for your kids, only worse, and smother the pain with an unknown dose of an unknown drug made in somebody's kitchen. And then... take a deep breath. You're an addict. So be addicted, just be addicted to something else. Choose the ones you love. Choose your future. Choose life."

The plot centres on Renton’s return and his three mates’ response to him having run off with their drug deal money 20 years earlier. He had paid Spud, who blew it on heroin, but Sick Boy wants to score a deeper revenge than his cue-stick attack. Begbie escapes jail and tries to kill them all.  

Age has brought the three lads to hunger for a dignity that they don’t have much chance ever to get. Sick Boy tries to move up from his seedy pimp-and-blackmail career to running a classy sauna-cum-brothel on an EU urban development grant — until a powerful pimp elbows him out. Renton is squeezed out of his London financial job and succeeds as a real estate agent until his old mates sink him. 

They can’t leave their laddish ways easily. Begbie returns to his wife and grown son, who prefers his college ambitions over joining Dad in his work. Begbie’s hunger for vengeance gets him back in jail. 

Spud has lost his wife and son to his heroin habit but by the end of the film seems on some road back. Sick Boy’s woman Veronica encourages Spud to write out his colourful anecdotes in his speaking voice — which will turn into the successful Irvine Welsh novels on which the film were based.  Renton survives.

Memory is a key theme in the film. The past is an actual presence when Renton’s mother’s shadow appears behind the empty kitchen chair, on his return after her death. In another scene Spud moves unleashed from his shadow — or vice versa. The last shot turns Renton’s boyhood bedroom into a continuously expanding tunnel from which we hurl away as if on a train, like the engines that fill the transporting boy’s wallpaper. 

The flashbacks to the first film flesh out the characters’ root in their past and struggle to emerge from it. When the men return to the highlands in memory of the dead Tommy, Sick Boy rejects the nostalgia: “You're a tourist in your own youth. We were young; bad things happened.” Sick Boy can’t escape his infant daughter’s death any more than Spud his self-destructive addictions and Rentpn’s nagging dream of normalcy. 
     In contrast, the precocious schoolgirl of Renton’s one-night stand has matured into a still insightful, expensive lawyer. But the four men have sadly failed to outgrow their old selves, though Renton has made the best stab at it. As Spud articulates their failures, “First, there's an opportunity. Then... there's a betrayal.” Under Danny Boyle’s direction this sequel takes advantage of the opportunity the first film and its ardent following provided — without betraying its values, spirit and energy. If the excremental vision is toned down slightly it’s to salutary effect.