Directed by Michael Winterbottom
Starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon
Running time: 1 hour and 43 minutes

by Ian Hrabe

Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip series occupies a weird space in the film continuum. Each feature is essentially a condensed version of its accompanying six-part BBC miniseries, and yet each film feels like an episode in a decade long TV series about two buddies gallivanting about the great cities bickering, cracking jokes and doing impressions. The films and TV series are effectively a riff on food and travel television, and just like that programming (with the exception of the edgier episodes of Anthony Bourdain’s shows), they are as undemanding as it gets. The Trip movies are peak non-essential cinema, but even so they always provide a cozy distraction from the real world.

The Trip to Greece is no exception. While these films don’t necessarily experience diminishing returns, they definitely employ a certain holding pattern. That means your mileage may vary. The original 2010 film is an unimpeachable and riotous joy, but no one would hold it against you for shunning the latter films for going back to the same well one, two, three times too many. Personally, I would have rather seen The Trip to Greece in its six-part entirety as this film feels the most abbreviated of the lot. It just feels like there is a lot of story missing from this one.

Here we find our intrepid travelling companions Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (playing exaggerated versions of themselves) retracing Odysseus’s travels through Greece. They eat at fancy restaurants, admire sublime vistas and, at one point, goad each other into a one-on-one swim race to see which middle-aged man is more spry and perfectly highlighting the undercurrent of competitiveness that imbues these films. Though the film is largely shenanigans-based, these films really work because each one employs an emotional core that is weighing on the characters that keeps these trips from being pure escapism. In The Trip to Greece, the impending death of Coogan’s father weighs heavily on him until the call comes. He’s still cracking wise with Brydon, but you can tell there’s a slight existential pang to everything he does. This leads to Coogan having some haunting, Bergman-esque dreams set in antiquity, and it helps to make this the strongest Trip movie since the original.

While all four of these movies are, in essence, about two men grappling with getting older, mortality and trying to settle down into satisfying lives and careers, there’s a simple joy to these that makes The Trip to Greece feel extra bittersweet, as it is the last one they are doing. Rob Brydon’s natural humor with Steve Coogan’s faux-gravitas is such a brilliant combination that they could keep churning these out for years and they would always be welcome. Though the men are essentially playing caricatures of themselves (Coogan mentions that he has won seven BAFTAs so many times I lost count), there is a lot of humanity here. You see it starkly when things turn serious, and when the facade breaks down you see that even though these guys have spent four films in a perpetual game of comedic one-upmanship and ball-busting they really love each other. It’s a side of male friendship that movies have a hard time getting right, and in The Trip to Greece this series feels like it is really hitting its stride, which makes it all the more of a bummer that this is the last time we get to hang out with these guys.

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