The best scene in “T2 Trainspotting” comes toward the middle, as a frightened Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) and a seething Franco Begbie (Robert Carlyle) sit in adjacent toilet stalls, each slowly realizing they are just a few feet away from an acquaintance who they haven’t seen in 20 years. The confrontation taking place in a filthy toilet is one of many nods to “T2”’s predecessor, Danny Boyle’s 1996 cult classic “Trainspotting.”
The sequel allows McGregor to sprint through cobblestone streets and slide over the hood of a car, to rant about “choosing life,” to listen to Iggy Pop — all just as he did when he was 20 years younger. “T2” pays devoted homage to “Trainspotting,” but it never quite manages to recapture the original’s glory.
The original “Trainspotting” makes heroin addiction seem charming. In Boyle’s Edinburgh, heroin addiction is young McGregor — grinning manically, lithe and pared down to his very essence. It’s dopey Spud (Ewen Bremner) kissing Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) on the mouth as he blathers about James Bond. It’s upbeat guitar riffs playing in the background.
“Trainspotting” focuses ominously on a group of young junkies, but it flips the script — turning filth into rock and roll and bestowing irresistible allure onto its crew of rail-thin addicts. With open arms and wry humor, it welcomes the world into the worst toilet in Scotland and somehow makes it seem like everyone else is missing something important by not being around. Over the last two decades, it has deservedly become a classic.
Now the same cast has reunited for “T2.” The original movie is based on Irvine Welsh’s novel of the same name, and the sequel is loosely based on Welsh’s sequel, “Porno” — set some years after the first installment. Renton returns to Edinburgh after having fled at the end of the previous movie and rekindles a friendship with the crafty Sick Boy — now referred to by his more dignified given name Simon — while dodging the vengeful thrusts of the spurned Begbie.
What the characters spend most of their time doing, however, is reminiscing. They watch hours of George Best highlights. They head back out to the windswept field in which they buried Tommy so many years ago. They even do heroin.
None of it is enough, though. The older versions of Renton, Sick Boy and Spud never manage to find the elusive spark which held them together and gave them hope when they were young, and at the end of the film, they are left just as confused as they were at the beginning.
Just as the characters in “T2” never manage to reconnect with the highs of their younger days, the movie itself never manages to recapture the magic of its predecessor. “Trainspotting”’s primary appeal is its youth — it’s a bildungsroman, propelled by the delightfully sardonic yet clueless narration of McGregor’s young Renton. The characters frantically search for meaning in the midst of their squalid surroundings, finding little more than death and loss. Matching their existential struggle is their British Invasion, skinny-jeaned magnetism — a group of trainwrecks oozing seduction.
It is because of this youthful essence that “Trainspotting” is so inimitable — adult versions of the same characters possess none of the same charm as their younger counterparts. Their aimlessness is now frustrating, which is a byproduct of fundamental incompetence rather than a byproduct of youth. The original’s sickening draw cannot be recreated by the conscientiously well-proportioned McGregor or the modern version of Miller, who has replaced his teenage smirk with a few dozen pounds and a miraculously squarer jaw.
“T2”’s nature mirrors its own content. The characters struggle with the impossibility of recapturing their youth, and the movie itself struggles to accept that recapturing the degenerate brilliance of “Trainspotting" is equally impossible. The sequel pays dutiful and clever lip service to its predecessor and will delight the original film’s many rabid fans, but Boyle and the cast know it can do no more.
“T2”’s limitations are a testament to the original — if the perilous wanderlust and manic joy of “Trainspotting” could ever be recaptured, it wouldn’t be “Trainspotting,” would it?
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