Review #468: 'Irvine Welsh's Ecstasy' (2011)

Adapted from one of three stories - The Undefeated - taken from Irvine Welsh's collection of three tales of chemical romance, sees a group of twenty-somethings indulging in the clubbing/pilling scene, and they hold the drug in high regard, often referring to it in terms of their connections to spirituality. They build their lives around such psychoactive explorations. Lloyd (Adam Sinclair) gets involved in drug dealing, and finds himself smuggling from Amsterdam, for local "hard-man" dealer, Solo (Carlo Rota). It of course all comes crumbling down; it wouldn't be a Welsh story if it didn't have the morality to take his characters to the depths of their situations and depravity (or though less depravity that, say, The Acid House (1998)).

A Canadian girl working in Edinburgh, Heather (played by pretty/vacant Kristin Kreuk), meets Lloyd and they fall  for each other under the influence of E, and they begin a saccharine, cringe-worthy, pathetic love affair. Billy Boyd's character somehow ends up institutionalised, and basically becomes Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), and the other friend pops up when required. Lloyd still owes Solo money, and this causes violent crescendos. It also attempts to connect the spiritual aspects of the chemically enhanced state of euphoria associated with ecstasy, with the natural chemical brain functions that occur when in love - aww, how cute!

It's all very poorly executed. The film making is uninspired, and seems to want to "borrow" many '90's cinematic tricks that were used for these kind of films (such as the other Welsh adaptation, and hugely successful Trainspotting (1996)), but they simply do not work, and to be honest, are completely dated by 21st century visuals - I mean, who really wishes to be given each characters name on the screen when, for one we don't actually care, and second, would you really do that when introducing a character half way through the film? What we can basically take from this, is that the post-modern aspects of '90's cinema are thankfully over, and this film is over a decade too late. Is the subject even relevant anymore? Or is this just a case of me no longer being in my twenties, and out-of-touch with youth culture. Perhaps, but I an still observant enough to adamantly state that this film is shit. And for a final piece of postmodernist bullshit, the film is marketed with exactly the same iconography as Trainspotting used sixteen years previously - pathetic.


Directed by: Rob Heydon
Starring: Adam Sinclair, Kristin Kreuk, Billy Boyd, Carlo Rota
Country: Canada/UK

Rating: *

Marc Ivamy