Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on the road again with wit and whimsy

GET ready for more inconsequential banter in The Trip to Italy, Michael Winterbottom’s sequel to his 2012 comic road movie The Trip.

Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan in a scene from the film, The Trip to Italy Supplied by Madman Picture: Supplied

WHO remembers that old parlour game called Chinese Whispers, in which a message is passed from ear to ear along a line of players?

In the best known example, what begins at one end as “Send reinforcements, we are going to advance” comes out at the other as “Send three-and-fourpence, we are going to a dance.” Kids’ stuff? Of course. But not too corny to find a place in The Trip to Italy, Michael Winterbottom’s sequel to his 2012 comic road movie The Trip, in which a couple of English chums made a tour of gourmet restaurants in the north of England and exchanged much inconsequential banter along the way. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are back for the rerun.

We follow them on a drive from Liguna to Capri, with the obligatory stopover in Rome, and who can resist those sunny hillside vistas and winding coastal roads, the drooling close-ups of culinary concoctions on artfully drizzled plates, the sumptuous villas and grand palazzi where the pair find regular lodgings?

But the chief pleasure lies once again in the free-flowing and largely improvised chitchat between Rob and Steve, little sketches and impersonations, riffs built on the latest fads and fashionable cliches. In this context — and surely nowhere else — Chinese Whispers sits comfortably with quotations from Shelley and Byron, Hamlet’s speech over Yorick’s grave, lewd double-entendres and re-enactments of imaginary Italian gangster movies.

If Michael Caine was the favoured target of mimicry in The Trip, this time we hear from Hugh Grant, Al Pacino, Humphrey Bogart, Robert De Niro and others.

I liked the scene when Brydon, rehearsing his role in a Michael Mann film, practises his dialogue in front of a mirror. He converses with a mummified corpse in a Mount Vesuvius museum. Nostalgia, gentle wit, word play, faux-naif satire and sheer self-indulgent tomfoolery — it’s all here. And I laughed rather more than I thought I would.

A Trip to Italy (M)

3 stars

Limited release