Movie review: The Trip to Italy

Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan reprise The Trip, but in Italy.

It's tempting to review this sequel to a 2011 hit by writing "The same as The Trip, but in Italy", and leaving it at that, since it is hard to imagine anyone responding to the two films differently. Coogan admits as much with a fate-tempting double-bluff remark in an early scene that "it feels odd to be doing the same thing for the second time".

My misgiving about this film is the same as I had about the last one: it's broad and obvious and I would call the humour blokey if it weren't so adolescent. But then, the quartet of young women behind me in the preview screening were falling about laughing.

For those unfamiliar with The Trip - like this, an edited version of a six-part telly series - it featured Coogan and Brydon eating at the Lake District's finest restaurants while bickering and trying to outdo each other's impersonations of famous actors. Here, they're doing the same thing in ... well, you know that.

Brydon has been commissioned by the Observer to review six restaurants, though how the hell he does that is anyone's guess since he never takes note - or even much notice - of anything he's eating. (Actually, the reviewing gig is a conceit, part of the film's playful blending of real and invented; it became almost creepily self-referential when the esteemed Observer Food Monthly did a feature about the imaginary critic and his non-existent reviews).

A food film this is not. If you want to know what they're eating, it helps to know Italian so you can understand the waitresses. We get only glimpses, in sequences whose rapid-fire editing betrays the project's small-screen origins, yet sometimes what is on the table is more interesting than what is being tossed across it.

Worse, on the trip from Piedmont to Campania we are often forced to deduce where exactly we are. It may be too much to suggest that this reflects the characters'/actors' self-obsession, but I'm going to do so anyway.

There are attempts to lend some poignancy to proceedings with ruminations about ageing and fathering and infidelity but they seem grafted on and gratuitous. It certainly has its moments but, like The Trip, it may be more digestible in television's small mouthfuls.

Cast: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Running time: 108 mins
Rating: M (offensive language)
Verdict: If you loved The Trip ...

- TimeOut