One Last Hit?

Twenty years after the era-defining Trainspotting made him a star – and the poster boy of ’90s excess – ewan McGregor is back as Renton. Can he still hack it?

- Marina Hyde

Recently, I was in a cinema when the trailer for T2, the new Trainspotting film, was played. The whole room erupted into cheers. Perhaps your excitement is not as delirious. There are many who are dismissing the film before it’s even been screened. But I have a feeling that your anticipation levels are linked to how you spent your 1990s. Trainspotting, the 1996 original, remains the quintessential mid-’90s movie. Like oasis and Blur, like Kate Mos and Firestarter, it was of its time and captured that time’s cynical yet optimistic, hedonistic heart. Though the story was about addicts, the feel of the film recalled experiences. There were real-unreal trippy sequences about losing pills in a toilet or going cold turkey; uplifting ones about clubbing. Plus fantastic music: Iggy Pop, Primal scream, left field. Trainspotting wasn’t shallow, but it didn’t dwell; it was always moving, like a long, clever pop video.

The characters were people you felt you already knew. There was Begbie, played by Robert Carlyle, the booze-fuelled, unpredictable psycho, a small-town Scottish version of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. Spud (Ewen Bremner): hapless, surreal, a lovable, addict, loser. Sexy sick Boy (Jonny lee Miller), out for whatever he could get, mostly women and trouble. And Renton, played by Ewan McGregor, the antihero, who kept kicking his habit and then going back, and doing the same to his mates, until he finally robbed them all (except spud) and ran away.