After “The Trip,” “The Trip to Spain” and “The Trip To Italy,” director Michael Winterbottom, a subpar U.K version of Francois Ozon, has given us another one of these limp-dick excuses for celebrity food-travel porn, this one titled “The Trip to Greece.”
Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are back, as vain caricatures of themselves, in a fiction and non-fiction hybrid which serves fans of the series more of what they liked about the previous entries. The buddy-comedy bandy of words between the two, over expensive entrées in gorgeous European locales, has been done to death in the previous three entries, but, hey, even Brydon admits here, over a glass of expensive Pinot no less, that “originality is overrated.”
At least, there aren’t any Michael Caine impersonations in “The Trip to Greece,” thank God for that because the first three did, no, instead our two dimwits go about their best Brando, De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, and Werner Herzog impersonations. The laughs are skimp. As they travel around the cradle of Western civilization, they are trying to retrace the footsteps of Odysseus’ 10-year journey into just six days, Winterbottom also attempts to cram in forced dramatic scenes involving Coogan’s ill Father dying back home in Manchester.
I will admit, ‘Greece’ is somewhat of an improvement on the last film, but, despite the lack of a Caine impersonation, this again feels like recycled fluff. Brydon’s famous “small man trapped in a box” routine and Coogan’s imitation of an actor badly dubbed show up again, with Brydon relentlessly playing the joke-a-minute comedian and Coogan putting on his usual deadpan bloke act. The sheer amount of self-serving comedy delivered here comes at the expense of not even doing justice to the beauty of Greece, which is relegated to the side for Brydon and Coogan’s meaningless shenanigans. [C]