Not bad, but certainly overrated

Rating: 5/10 (14 April 2017)

I've never been a big fan of TRAINSPOTTING, despite the hype surrounding it and the fact that everybody else seems to absolutely love it. I find the story of the drug-addicted Scottish yokels to be pretty depressing, and certainly not to be celebrated as some kind of tragi-comedy. If you want to see an anti-drug film that's even more horrifying and hard hitting, I'd recommend REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, which is by far the better movie. Otherwise I find films like the Irish comedy ADAM & PAUL more affecting and interesting than this effort.
TRAINSPOTTING is well-directed, that's for sure; Danny Boyle injects a great deal of energy and incident into his fast-paced movie, so it's never a boring watch. However, the characters fail to be likable in any way, and the whole film feels like an exercise in the gross-out: the injecting scenes, the hallucination scenes, the toilet scene, the bedsheet scene, all of these moments are designed to be edgy and provocative, but I found them quite juvenile. It's an exercise in star-making, certainly, but the only actor who really shines here is the frightening Robert Carlyle, who got his Bond villain role in THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH on the back of this. Ewan McGregor is, as ever, overrated, just like the film as a whole.