Review | T2 Trainspotting | February 28

T2: Trainspotting is a film that encapsulates John Lennon’s lyrics, “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans,” although it might be better summed up by The Sex Pistols: “No future/No future for you/No future for me.”

T2 picks up 20 years after the original film Trainspotting, with the same characters, Sick Boy, Spud, Renton and Begbie, played by the same actors going through the motions of what their lives have become.

That’s certainly the case for Spud, who has been a heroin addict for 20 years, Begbie, who has been in jail for 20 years, Sick Boy, a cocaine addict, and Renton, who appears to have escaped a life of hopelessness in Edinburgh’s slums but has been caught in a whirlpool of despair like the others.

For these lads, youth was a rite of passage involving heroin and sex. Heroin and sex also became the terms of their confinement to lives of despair and a lack of achievement. 

Twenty years on, they say that they are tourists in their own youth. Not much has changed. They are older but no wiser. Rather than reflecting on what has happened and how they can move on, they dwell on the past and how they can exact revenge, which sentences them to repeat their mistakes.

As Spud states often, their friendships are based on opportunities that are destroyed by betrayals.

T2, like the original film, is soaked in debased language, unconstrained violence, and explicit drug use and sexual encounters.

Don’t worry if you haven’t seen or can’t remember the original film. T2 employs flashbacks from the first Trainspotting and the essentials are filled in through dialogue.

Spud, Sick Boy, Begbie and Renton are like the urban landscapes that surround them. They are waiting to be demolished.

T2 is not a film for everyone. It is vibrant and energetic filmmaking that makes no excuses and accepts no compromises.