T2 Trainspotting

In his youth, Irvine Welsh was part of a truly special society of London slums among drug addicts, criminals, and generally people from the bottom of society. He adopted their language and managed to get closer to them so that he could have material for his first books. They were considered a literary sensation because of their suggestive expressiveness and authenticity. Welsh became rich and started living the life of a successful middle-class man. He wanted to keep writing, but the market expected more stories from his life as a British scumbag - and that was the stumbling block. Mentally, he distanced himself from this class, forgot the slang, and returning to those same waters was practically impossible for him. That's actually what Danny Boyle is trying to do in T2. I claim that viewers who considered the original Trainspotting a revelation and not just a generational manifesto will greatly enjoy this film - after all, Boyle directed it. But for me, it only played a small role. I criticize two things in the film that don't destroy it but significantly weaken it - sentiment and nostalgia. It is not the kind of nostalgia that turned the Czech film Snowdrops and Aces into an unwatchable piece of crap after 25 years, not least because Boyle is in a completely different league than Viktor Tauš. Nevertheless, I was disappointed by how much the director tried to imitate the original concept. While he doesn't copy the scenes mechanically, he shoots them in a way that makes you associate each individual scene with shots from the original Trainspotting as often as possible. The same people, the same setting, the same problems, and similar jokes. He even repeatedly uses shots from the original film. I did want Boyle to continue with this topic, but in his spirit and style and not literally. I'd say that a  sequel to Trainspotting actually already exists because director Jon S. Baird's Filth already stylistically approached Trainspotting as much as possible in the first half. By the way, Filth, which I gave four stars, is precisely the reason why I ultimately give T2 only 3 stars. This is because Filth made a better impression on me as a whole than T2 and I have to express that difference somehow. T1 was a wild ride on the edge of the junkie's needle, and T2 only leaves me with individual details in my memory. Worth mentioning is the packed five-star soundtrack, and a few comedy scenes, but as a whole, it's nothing special. This is related to my second criticism. T1 was cinematically brilliant in how it managed to perfectly combine entertainment with a realistic probe into the lives of junkies in a condensed space of 90 minutes, without any moralizing or sentimentality. It showed a lot of ugly and cruel things but didn't move you. And whenever you wanted to be moved, it showed you a middle finger and stuck it to you. T1 is devoid of any catharsis. When Renton decides to quit heroin, don't look for anything positive in it. His high expression says, now I'll show you. No matter what Boyle thinks, he didn't even come close to the rawness of the first film. Begbie, an exemplary brutal sociopath, reconciles with his son, who disappointed him, shakes his hand, and wishes him to be better than his dad and granddad. In T1, Begbie would have knocked out a couple of his teeth in the same situation. Everything has softened somehow. The friendship of the gang of junkies in T1 only worked until they needed to steal their friend's dose or drown him if the situation required it. The second film is devoid of cynical sarcasm, provocative incorrectness, and a punkish grin. The black humor is still there but it's not much different from what we are used to in ordinary crime comedies. The crime plot is quite barren, and the main female character is not interesting either in terms of acting or the script. Kelly MacDonald once showed much greater charisma in a much smaller space, and in T2, she remains shamefully unused. Deep down, I was hoping that T2 would be as dirty and controversial as the first one, but my partial disappointment doesn't change the fact that T2 is still a decent and reasonably entertaining film that winked at me sympathetically a few times and reminded me of the energy that I adored in the cult film from the 90s. There's no need to regret buying a ticket for T2. Overall impression: 65%. (20/02/2017) (less) (more)