Trainspotting Review

Boyle refuses the sermon. The opening Choose Life run, cut to Iggy Pop over a foot chase down Princes Street, sells the appeal of the life before anything else, and the honesty of the film is that it keeps insisting the drug works until it very obviously does not. Brian Tufano shoots the flat interiors in sickly reds and greens, then goes fully surreal for the withdrawal sequence and the toilet dive, so the formal breaks arrive exactly where the character's grip fails.

Ewan McGregor plays Renton as amused and self-aware, which makes the audience complicit, and Robert Carlyle's Begbie is frightening because he is not on anything, just a man who enjoys hurting people. The soundtrack functions as structure rather than decoration. The dialogue crackles, particularly the Sean Connery digression and the Tommy scenes. It falters in the last act, which pivots to a fairly conventional heist and betrayal that flattens characters the film had carefully complicated, and one devastating mid-film sequence leaves everything after it straining to match. Still ferociously alive.