Review of The Trip (2011) by Joshua B — 14 Jan 2013

While not quite as brilliantly off-the-wall, laugh out loud funny as Tristram Shandy, the previous collaboration between director Michael Winterbottom and the acting duo of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, The Trip might be, in some ways, the better film.

It is ostensibly about the pair traversing the English countryside -- as in Tristram Shandy, playing themselves -- for a restaurant review tour. Brydon is an unwelcome sidekick, only brought in to accompany Coogan when his girlfriend backs out of the trip at the last minute.

Winterbottom takes this simple, potentially terrible premise, and makes it about the differences between the two men within the middle age millieu: Brydon is happily married and Coogan is in a relationship with its own doomed ennui.

The strongest aspects of the film are not the pair's endless attempts at comic one-upmanship -- though those are fantastic; dueling Michael Caine impressions might be the funniest moment of the year -- but the thoughtful musings on friendship, middle age, relationships, and discontent.