I’LL never forget seeing The Trip for the first time, at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2010. The larky little movie, starring British comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, sent their characters on a modest adventure through the English lake country, where they dined and drank at some of the region’s most tony gastropubs and exchanged improvisatory bons mots over glasses of claret and against stunning rural backdrops.

I emerged from that screening utterly charmed but wondering whether Coogan and Brydon’s rapid-fire, inside-jokey wit, and the film’s small canvas, would translate for Americans. Happily enough, they did, and The Trip found a loving audience in viewers who can still quote their Michael Caine impersonation competition word for word — most famously, “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”

That quote, of course, was from the 1969 caper The Italian Job. So it’s only fitting that Coogan and Brydon reprise their Michael Caine bit in The Trip to Italy, the highly anticipated follow-up in which they motor through that country’s picturesque seaside and islands. Admittedly, it’s a relief when they dispose of the Caine material within the first 15 minutes — the better to regale audiences with brand-new impressions of famous actors and more obscure, random characters. (One of the film’s more uproarious scenes has Brydon playing an unctuous talk-show host while Coogan does his passive-aggressive best to dodge his interlocutor’s barbed put-downs.)

As the guys themselves observe, in The Trip their journey was inspired by the poetic sensibilities of Wordsworth and Coleridge; here, they’re guided by Byron and especially Shelley, to whom they pay homage when they visit the gorgeous town where he drowned. Once again, director Michael Winterbottom has created a feast for just about all of the senses, if you include vicarious taste: delicious meals of pasta and fresh seafood are photographed in all the fetishistic glory of a Pinterest board with super-high production values. In keeping with the indulgent mood, the film-maker infuses the proceedings with infectiously breezy pacing even when the subjects at hand turn towards the maudlin.

Worries about mortality, artistic impermanence and moral duty lie coiled at the heart of The Trip to Italy, uneasily making their presence felt alongside the hedonistic pleasures that the protagonists — and their audience — are lapping up like too much perfectly chilled limoncello. The tonal juxtaposition fails only once, in a particularly jarring scene set alongside a mummified body in Pompeii, when one character’s wit (or at least his judgement) pointedly fails him while his mortified friend looks on. The ensuing transition lands less as a profound comment on the transience of life than as troubling tone-deafness.

The Trip to Italy — during which Coogan and Brydon helpfully provide a cinematic history of Italy as a filming location, from Beat the Devil and Contempt to The Godfather — ends with similarly jarring, perfunctory suddenness. But maybe that’s just because we’ve come to enjoy the company of these two annoyingly compulsive one-uppers so improbably much. It takes a moment to realise that, this time out, some tables have been turned — and not just the ones with pristine white tablecloths. The wine Coogan and Brydon are opening this time may lack some of the novel fizz of the first one, but The Trip to Italy is like most vacations: a few bumps here and there, but over all too quickly.

By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, August 30th, 2014