Word: rentonly
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...plane designated Flight 800 was one of the oldest Boeing 747s in use. N93119 was the 153rd 747 to come off the Boeing production line in Renton, Washington, in 1971. At one point, it had been set aside for Eastern Airlines; then it was supposed to become part of prerevolutionary Iran's official fleet. But it ended up with TWA. N93119 has flown all over the world, but in recent months it has served as a transatlantic carrier, flying mainly from Washington and New York City to Paris and points in the Mediterranean, including Tel Aviv and Athens...
...director Danny Boyle just seems gleefully to forget any seriousness about one quarter of the way through the film. There are points where you hope for some witty Scottish version of the classic "Drugstore Cowboy," as Renton talks lyrically just like Matt Dillon did of his devotion to drugs...
...movie's own cheerful irreverence clashes with more hard-hitting moments, such as the downfall of the perfect Tommy (Kevin McKidd), leading to a general unevenness, set to a techno beat. The innocence shines through now and again--a kitten in a drug den, even Renton's own face alone--only to be quickly undermined. There's nothing wrong with mixing scatological or whoops-I've-slept-with-a-transvestite humor with addiction drama, but "Trainspotting" somehow manages to fall into the sit-com, serious moment dead zone: "Goddamn it say something, Renton! Somebody say something...
...Renton's withdrawal provides probably the lowest point in the film. Renton doesn't so much hallucinate as dream a carefully engineered catalog of guilt and fashionably crazy images: the ceiling-crawling dead baby (an unpardonable motor mockup) of an addict friend, check; a game show about HIV (a risk with syringes, we mustn't forget), check; and a voracious bed that swallows him up, check. To repeat--and oh, but the movie does--a techno beat pounds on throughout the scene, making Renton's screaming seem that of a hard rock star rather than an addict in withdrawal...
Director Boyle keeps the requisite frenetic pace, and everything literally hits the ground running. The few tableaus where the camera and the bodies it captures are at rest provide the film's better moments: the silhouetted, smoking heads of Renton and Begbie after a violent confrontation, or the portrait of the youths standing on a train platform...