Movie Review – Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy (2011)

A drug runner discovers true love and a whole lot of trouble as he attempts to become a dealer of ecstasy pills.

When Ally suggests that time is passing them by Lloyd decides to strike it out on his own by skimming off some product from his volatile boss Solo (Carlo Rota).  The trouble is Solo can sniff out a double-cross a mile away.  While having a dance party in the basement of a church Lloyd encounters Heather Thompson (Kristin Kreuk) and he starts to feel a natural rather than an artificial high.  When the police raid the gathering Heather and Lloyd escape together and so begins their romantic entanglement; their bliss is interrupted by Solo continually upping the debt owned to him by Lloyd which puts the lives of the two lovers in grave danger.

Here is the thing.  I knew when Solo had an underlining move closer to him that a headbutt would immediately follow and guess what, it did.  There was a sense that the boxes were being checked off.  The interaction between Lloyd and his alcoholic father (Stephen McHattie) felt like scenes inserted to make the main character sympathetic rather than packing an emotional weight.  Solo attempt to play a psychotic seems forced unlike Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast (2000) where I had nightmares of meeting him in a dark alley.  The trouble is that I never made a connection with Adam Sinclair and Kristen Kreuk whereas the supporting cast of Keram Malicki-Sánchez and Olivia Andrup made for an intriguing and believable pairing.  It also helps that Andrup looks rather fetching in a Catholic school girl outfit which she discards in what is best described as a fast forward sex scene.  

The time lapse photography, slow motion and fast forward of images, the spinning camera moves, freeze frame name captions, and pulsating dance music are incorporated to induce the sensation brought on by taking ecstasy pills. The stylized editing, sound effects and camera work is a cool idea but lacks the finesse of Requiem for a Dream (2000) where Darren  Aronofsky skillfully integrated all of those elements to create a disturbing depiction of addiction spinning out of control. The intoxicating combination of author Irvine Welsh and filmmaker Danny Boyle which resulted in Trainspotting (1996) is a hard one for writer-director Rob Heydon to compete with and unfortunately the end result is a low rather than a high.