Heroin makes you constipated. I was constipated and, sitting on the toilet before the screening, I wrote this to leave you with the image.

Luckier at least than anyone reading this, I missed exactly all the trailers in front of T2-Trainspotting, the least awaited sequel since Bad Santa 2, We Couldn’t Call It Badder Santa Because We Released The Uncut Version With That Title And Also We’re So, So Sorry. I didn’t know but my inability to dump was about as authentic as the experience was going to get.

As I sit here on the toilet after the film, this time successful (‘the writing is just pouring out of me!’), it is a film certainly to think about. It is an uncompelling mess (eww!), and feels mostly like reading a transcript of a chat room talking about the first film twenty years later. The fact that it’s the characters doing the chatting would have been sad enough, but in this case, it’s the filmmakers.

The film seems to think that we would somehow enjoy, automatically, seeing where the characters are now. But what made the original great wasn’t so much the characters themselves, but the the way in which they made being a heroin addict fun, while in no way romanticizing it. Suddenly, there was a contrast between the way we were supposed to treat addicts – as subjects of movies of the week, and how the film did. Plus, there’s the toilet scene. Which I guess I stole.

There’s a potential story in the sequel about the way in which the old, nostalgic and bourgeois are the worse junkie of all. Now all films we don’t like are films we would have like to be different, but I believe the film thought there was a story there as well. Mr. Ewan MacGregor comments on the yuppification of Edinburgh and the only sign of life was the updating of the Choose Life speech for the modern age, with choose updating your profile and so forth. It could have been great by making being bourgeois seem fun.

I guess you’d have to romanticize it a little bit. Junkies would have loved it.

Instead the film follows the consequences of Mr. MacGregor’s stealing in the drugs at the end of the first film, something which we don’t even really remember. The characters follow their mechanical desires of revenge and well, waiting around Edinburgh be revenged upon. With plot to the forefront and a noticeable lack of the authentic and ironic details that the first provided, the films feels very much as the best we could come up with, what with the actor’s schedules and all.

On the other hand, my legal sneak led to seeing 20th Century Women, one of the best films of the year, so, thanks poop!

Besides the need to invent a story in lieu of having an interesting take on life, there’s also the almost Marvel Universe like reverence to the original. Scenes are constantly quoted and re-quoted throughout. When Mr. Ewan Bremmer lays out the photographs of the group from the first movie, we feels like watching the cover band that someone else tricked you into paying for.

This cynical pandering (could have made a movie about that character) culminates in a needless recreation of the Mr. MacGregor’s kicking heroin childhood bedroom. In the original, the vertiginous effect of the wall retreating as Mr. MacGregor sicks up is in camera, and effective. In the sequel, it is CGI, and, for the point of the story, pointless. It is the attitude of CGI, and the very rich, which I guess all these guys are now: we didn’t do it because we wanted to, or were desperate to say something, or to piss people off. We did it because we could.

That’s the line you give the villain.