The Trip to Italy (2014)– The Trip was a miniseries turned film about Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, a pair of comedians playing fictionalized versions of themselves, touring the English countryside, reviewing restaurants, and antagonizing each other. Its sequel is the best kind of sequel – more of the same, self-aware of the absurdity of just doing it again, and just as riotously funny as the first. Coogan and Brydon continue to one-up each other on every topic from careers to impressions (on the latter, they’re in Italy, so you can imagine the Godfather allusions that proliferate, including one direct reenactment), from philosophical observations to precise trivia about seminal English poets. The pair have an undeniable combative chemistry, which really manifests in the deleted scenes, where they occasionally break “character” and laugh at the absurd rhetorical circles into which they chase each other. Where Coogan was more the straight man in the first Trip, exasperated by the ease with which Brydon can trigger a laugh, here he’s more laidback, more ready to get in on the fun, as when a conversation about Batman delves first into dueling Michael Caine impersonations before musing on the fact that Tom Hardy is “in a contest to see who can be the least understandable.” A subplot about infidelity is surprisingly sobering in The Trip to Italy, wallpapered over though it is by a stammering Hugh Grant impression, and one wonders if director Michael Winterbottom is musing about boorish vacuity or if he’s likening the fictional avatars to the storied biographies of the poets they’re chasing. There is a third film, The Trip to Spain, and the laughs-per-minute quotient here guarantees that the third will be well worth seeing.That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!
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