:"The Trip" franchise combines food porn, scenery porn and middle-aged-men-being-passive-agressive-at-one-another porn into a reasonably successful middlebrow arthouse franchise. The dynamics of the three are pretty similar - Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon travel around from restaurant to restaurant, chatting about their professional positions, where they are in the world, and duelling impersonations of various cultural figures that have relevance to middle-aged-men (largely Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Roger Moore, David Bowie and Mick Jagger this time around). Coogan will be the one with the slightly higher rung of fame, seeking to either consolidate it or to better himself, while Brydon will be reasonably satisfied with where he already is, but still willing to take potshots at his friend's pretensions.
In this case, the Spanish scenery really does look very beautiful, as does much of the food, and if the remainder can feel a little slight, there's still a genuine dynamic between the two as a portrayal of a friendship that is no less real for all that it has rather jaggy edges to it. For the philosophically inclined, it's a vacation where your fellow travellers have slightly more entertaining neuroses than your own. It's not world re-inventing but it is reasonably amusing.
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