Danny Boyle's group portrait of young Edinburgh deadbeats bound together by their addiction to heroin — a junk bond, as it were. For all its visual flash and dash — all its distorting lenses, freeze frames, fast-motion, and so forth; all its head-first dives into the rabbit hole (or in one particular instance, the toilet bowl) of fantasyland — its storytelling method limps along on the crutch of first-person voice-over. Adapted as it was from a novel by Irvine Welsh, it remains the quintessential literary movie, entrusting the disbursal of hard information to a kind of tour-guide narrator. And the scabrousness and scatology of the language are hardly sufficient by themselves to liberate it from the library. (The frequent unintelligibility of the Scots dialect and vernacular is, in consequence, more of a handicap in these circumstances than it otherwise might have been.) Street talk can still achieve bookish talk. With Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller, Ewen Bremner, Robert Carlyle. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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