Brilliant

Rating: 10/10 (24 April 2005)

STAR RATING:*****Unmissable****Very Good***Okay**You Could Go Out For A Meal Instead*Avoid At All Costs
Renton (Ewan McGregor) is a heroin addict who's making one last ditch,final attempt to kick himself into gear for good.The film basically follows the fortunes and mis-fortunes of himself,his friends Spud (Ewen Bremner),non-drug user Tommy (Kevin McKidd),Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) and the psychotic Begbie (Robert Carlyle) as they venture from triumpth to tragedy,before the ending rolls by determining whether they really will decide to settle down and 'choose life.'
It's funny,because the last film I reviewed,yesterday,Mean Streets was also a film that launched some actors to super-stardom,and this did exactly the same for some fine Scottish talents.Ewan McGregor's a big star in Hollywood now,but never has he delivered a performance as heartfelt and honest as he does in the lead role here.He no doubt looks back nowaday and thinks so himself.He carries the film perfectly,but all the supporting cast do a tremendous job of things as well,especially Miller as the well-spoken and thoroughly engaging Sick Boy and Carlyle in mesmerizing debut form as the psychotic,ultra violent,knife wielding thug Begbie,a performance he contrasted well with his much calmer,more reserved approach in coming roles.
The film is set in Edinburgh,the drug capital of the UK,and catches well the social depravity and decay running rampant in certain areas there that allowed it to get this way.But this film's major achievement is portraying the pleasant and dreamy social isolation of the heroin addict in relation to the rest of society going on around them.It also brilliantly contrasts the life of the heroin addict with the supposedly conformist,non-questioning,ultra-boring existence of the average joe.As the film says,choose life,but why would you want to do a thing like that?But it's also careful to show the devastating downside of drug mis-use,none more powerfully than watching the Tommy character's orderly,well-kept house (in relation to the squalid existence of the others!) deteriorate pretty rapidly from his first experimentation with heroin into a dead-aired,stripped,dark tomb,not to mention his horrifying physical decline from a healthy,athletic football player into a slumping,pale wreck.This is most noticeable,but McGregor also delivers a chilling cold turkey scene in his bedroom,showing hallucinations involving his so-called mates and dead babies crawling across his ceiling.In fact,there's a scene involving a dead baby which in itself is fairly nasty.It also benefits from a great soundtrack,from artists as diverse as Iggy Pop to Ice MC,which is well used to compliment each scene the given track is allocated to.
The 90s was the decade in which the British Film Industry really found it's feet and took off (despite some of the crocks of sh*t it tends to release nowadays!) and Trainspotting played a big part,along with the likes of Secrets and Lies and The Full Monty,in doing this.And so it should have.*****