Directed by: Michael Winterbottom
Starring: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon
Rating: NR

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon star in The Trip. (Courtesy photo)

If you think you’ve seen a movie about nothing (Napoleon Dynamite and 2001: A Space Odyssey come to mind), you haven’t seen The Trip. Within the first minute-and-a-half of this British countryside romp (if eating in a series of exceedingly fancy restaurants can be considered a “romp”), we have the entire premise, and within the last minute and a half we have the resolution. For that hour and 45 minutes in the middle, we get a string of pointless—but hilarious—banter.

Steve Coogan (Tropic Thunder) plays himself, as does his good friend Rob Brydon (Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels). Coogan’s girlfriend has, at the last minute, decided not to go with him on a trip through Northern England to stay in cozy inns and eat at famed restaurants. Desperate to have someone go with him, he asks Brydon to come along, making it clear that Brydon was not his first choice as a traveling companion. And so the two forty-something actor-comedians take off. Throughout their week in the country they engage in impression contests (imitating everyone from Michael Caine to Woody Allen to Sean Connery), poem recitals, witty repartee, and ruminations, albeit not very deep ones, on what it’s like to get older. The happily married Brydon is chipper about life, lapsing into impressions in every other sentence and enjoying comically lewd conversations with his wife over the telephone every night. Coogan, on the other hand, is bothered by Brydon’s lack of grounding in the real world and by his own failures, which aren’t so much failures as they are victories that weren’t big enough to satisfy his ego.

And that’s it. An hour and 45 minutes of banter followed by depressing midlife crisis, followed by more banter and more midlife crisis. What the movie lacks in plot—and it lacks a lot—it makes up for with Coogan and Brydon’s rapport and wit. They’re comedians, after all, and The Trip shows us what a two-person stand-up comedy routine might look like. Director Michael Winterbottom (In This World) seems to be barely involved; he basically turns on the camera and lets the two leads go at it.

Brydon is definitely the more likeable of the two, considering his good humor in all situations and his ability to do both silly voices and great impersonations (an ability that surpasses Coogan’s by far). His character—if you can call it that—also isn’t going through a midlife crisis, doesn’t have a relationship on the ropes, and just generally seems to be imperturbably cheery. Coogan, our lead, often winds up as the straight man to Brydon’s antics (not that he doesn’t have plenty of antics of his own), unless he’s on the phone with his girlfriend or talking to his agents. He comes across as a particularly sad person when he’s alone or talking to someone other than Brydon. He seems to be uncomfortable, unsure if he’s living a settled-down life or if he’s just unsettled. And while more development of that part of his character might have made for more traditionally suitable movie material, we get the impression from his serious scenes that the movie would have been quite a drag if it were a full-blown midlife crisis film. Chances are, going with banter for the vast majority of the movie was the right move.

While Coogan and Brydon are hysterically funny, bits and routines don’t work so well as the basis of a movie. In this case, the lack of structure is forgivable, since the movie is edited from a TV series that aired last year. And even if it weren’t, Coogan and Brydon really are funny enough to keep the audience interested, whether it be through explaining how Michael Caine’s voice has changed over the years, or fantasizing what they would say in an epic battle movie, or just singing in the car. These are funny people, high-caliber entertainers, and they deserve to be watched.

Danny Eisenberg is a 2010 graduate of the Bromfield School and is currently a student at the University of Pennsylvania.