We’re only a few minutes into “The Trip to Italy” when we get what we came for: hilarious dueling Michael Caine impressions from Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. A similar scene was the highlight of 2010’s “The Trip,” to which this is a sequel.
But is a reprise as good as a continuation? Does it matter that the film they’re joking about, “The Dark Knight Rises,” is in turn a movie that borrows freely from its own back story? Do we nod wisely when “The Trip to Italy” disparages sequels, or is this as irritating as when a meticulously put-together girl insists, “Oh, I just threw this on”? Not sure.
“Italy,” like its predecessor, is a gustatory buddy-movie road trip in which fictionalized versions of Coogan and Brydon glide from one tantalizing restaurant to another while doing celebrity impressions and reciting tourist-guidebook factoids, in this case about Byron and Shelley. It’s photographically yummy, heaving with sun-dappled vistas and four-star dining. The boys float around a bit in the sea and enjoy homemade pasta while trundling out their impressions of, say, Marlon Brando.
Some bits are very funny, but they all come to seem like reaching; as the film moseyed on I wished director Michael Winterbottom would sharpen his focus a bit and get to the point, any point. But the nearest we come is when Brydon — or “Brydon” — confesses to a friend (Claire Keelan) that he has cheated on his wife with a girl (Rosie Fellner) he met on a sailing cruise. “Brydon” delivers this confession, exasperatingly, in the voice of Hugh Grant, trotting out this gag for about the fourth time.
Maybe there’s an unintended meta-comment in there somewhere about how male comics view women as fodder for cheap flings or as an audience willing to laugh on command. But it’s hard to escape the suspicion that Coogan, Brydon and Winterbottom resolutely avoided saying anything other than that it’s fun to frolic in Italy on someone else’s dime.