Sequels

Tedious, lazy and pretentious – Irvine Welsh’s Men in Love is a disgrace

There are 32 years between the publication of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and his Men in Love – a gap roughly equivalent to that between Sgt. Pepper and ‘Windowlicker’ by Aphex Twin. Perhaps three cultural generations. It is disturbing, therefore, to find Welsh still pumping out further sequels to his spectacular literary debut. But whereas that had verbal fireworks, razor-sharp dialogue, superb character ventriloquism and a fearless examination of Scottish moral rot, Men in Love is – let’s be frank – tedious, lazy, pretentious and simply bad writing. Under the influence of American Psycho, Welsh has had characters narrating their fleeting perceptions since Filth (1998), in the hope that accumulation will

Six sequels that outdo the original film

‘Sequels are whores’ movies’, the great screenwriter William Goldman once opined. As with so much that Goldman said, it’s pithy, witty and often accurate. All of us have been lured into cinemas with the promise of the continuation of a great film, only to be sorely disappointed by the cynicism of a lazy cash-in. Several of these have deservedly gone down as some of the worst pictures ever made: there is no need for any sensible person to watch Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights or Jaws: The Revenge. Yet there are also examples of sequels that equal, even surpass, the original, where either the original filmmakers return to a story