'Trainspotting' is like Speeding Through The Digestive Tract of An Insatiable Beast!

Rating: 9/10 (4 February 2016)

Trainspotting is a rambling chronicle of high times in low company. By turns cheeky, surreal, exhilarating and stomach-churning, it follows assorted days in the lives of mangy Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor who is absolutely brilliant as the smart-aleck junkie) - a degenerate boil on society's backside - and the scabby crew of junkies, deadbeats, thieves, liars and nut jobs he calls friends. These characters are not duped by evil drug pushers, but consciously choose drugs over the banality of well, pretty much everything else. But these personalities, like the settings — bile green apartment walls and the blood red den of their dealer - are stylized and get a sudden and shocking reality injection straight after a catalog of hilariously catastrophic encounters. Renton tries to get his life back on the rails, but the nightmares of his past follow him even to London where he snatches despair from the very jaws of hope. Fittingly, he and his unwelcome flat-mates return briefly to their Edinburgh roots to bury another heroin statistic, before a coach trip back south for an amateurish, pathetic drug deal - selling rather than buying, for once, and for one last thrill. It all goes pear-shaped, naturally, and no one is surprised, because by now the message is sinking in: heroin is for losers!
But in the hands of Danny Boyle and the fantastic cast, it is possible to receive that message as an unprecedented and unrivaled piece of entertainment – it would be hard to imagine a movie about drugs, depravity, and all-around bad behavior more electrifying than Trainspotting. Though the bulk of the humor is blacker than a raven's wing at midnight, Boyle's sense of humanity persistently creeps in around the edges making the movie a singular sensation. While getting the squalor and degradation of the junkie lifestyle down to the last grotesque detail, he captures the stoned-out, gut-sickening experience of hardcore addiction with hallucinogenic acuity.
The film is peppered with harrowing sequences where you will find yourself trapped between a belly-laugh and a scream, as the characters rail, chuckle, shout and dive into darkness. Sample the scene where Renton loses some suppositories down a toilet in a squalid off-track-betting washroom and dives into the crud-encrusted porcelain after them, suddenly swimming through the clear waters of his opiated imaginings. Buoyed by a great Brit Pop soundtrack, agile cinematography and rich, earthy dialogue that gushes like a ruptured sewer, etching characters deeper than any laughter lines -''Take the best orgasm you ever had, multiply it by a thousand, and you're still nowhere near it,'' reports Renton, describing his high – such scenes make the movie a searing pop-art portrait of a lost generation blowing out its brains.
All in all, Danny Boyle's Trainspotting is a blast of ice-cold water across a sweaty brow where the bleak subject matter is presented as a hilariously funny walk on the wild side, with no moral stance taken or punches pulled.