First off, everyone who doesn’t like British comedy can leave the room. As well as those of you not fond of improvisation, mockumentaries, and watching two actors work their way through impressions of Michael Caine and Sean Connery over and over until, at the end, their dialogue is an almost incomprehensible goulash in-joke of old James Bond lines and imitations of Billy Connolly. If that doesn’t sound entertaining, I recommend turning back to “Dancing With the Stars” and leaving the “QI” reruns to the rest of us.

Director Michael Winterbottom’s “The Trip” follows Steve Coogan (you should know him as Alan Partridge) inviting Rob Brydon (who tends to the small man trapped in a box) on an all-expenses paid job traveling the north of England and writing about its snootiest food for the Observer. It’s best when it’s just improvisation, or seeming improvisation, like Coogan explaining why he feels Joy Division’s spare, moody “Atmosphere” is the ideal soundtrack for the countryside, or their deadpan banter at fancy restaurants. Coogan, smacking loudly on tomato soup, remarks, in a manner of someone you would not expect to be hired to write about food, “well, it tastes of tomatoes.”

The tomato soup — and the duck-fat lollipops and the kale and vodka martini and “sacks” of foie gras and the premier cru — are just hors d’oeuvres for the main course, which is their back and forth on how one does a proper Michael Caine impression, and how the star’s voice has evolved from “The Italian Job” to “The Dark Knight.” This could clearly drive other people insane. I mean, can you imagine sitting next to a pair of guys at a restaurant shouting “SHE WAS ONLY 15 YEARS OLD!” at each other for two minutes straight?

It’s kind of like hanging out with the socially awkward kids in high school who were trading Pink Floyd ROiOs in the early 90s, have every Monty Python sketch memorized and whose clothes don’t quite fit right. (In other words, the kids who will be too hot/brilliant/busy with spectacular thing for the reunion in ten years.)

“The Trip” has some flaws. Coogan’s fictional character is dealing with a divorce from your typically one-dimensionally hard-edged woman, a crumbling relationship with a typically one-dimensionally hot American, and the occasional “Bottle Rocket”-style whirlwind one-night romance with a typically one-dimensionally steamy-eyed hotel worker, the kind who always make me wonder if there really are upstanding women out there falling faint into strange men’s beds, or if male filmmakers just keep writing such scenes to encourage that behavior. And then there’s the desperately sad-clown melancholy piano music and frequent cuts to the most serious and humorless kitchen staffs I’ve ever seen, perfecting their miniscule dollops and perfect cuts as their two guests snicker in the dining room. Combined, it heavily suggests that whatever’s going on now, it could end in suicide or a squinty gaze out to sea, reflecting on the rotting promises of youth, in a few seconds.

One shouldn’t watch a movie wishing there was less plot, but that’s how I felt with this one, like Coogan and Brydon should just be watched from afar traveling between restaurants whose meals cost as much as the typical worker’s weekly wage, criticizing their pretense (like one place’s salt, arranged in lines next to the butter — “can we have a knife for the butter, please, and a rolled up 20 pound note for the salt?”) not taking them as seriously as the chefs would wish (at one point, Brydon coaches Coogan as to how he can safely criticize each restaurant, by giving him the range in which other foodies have criticized each) and analyzing Roger Moore’s best one-liners in between. And then, all of a sudden, the sad piano leaps in, and you wonder if you’re supposed to find some shake-your-head aspect when Coogan says “I’m in a trough, literally and metaphorically.”

Was someone was trying to make this movie a stealth-drama, the kind that seems funny at first but makes you feel utterly sorry for the pitiful Wordsworth-memorizing sex-maniacs in it by the end, and puffed up with your own superiority because your lawn looks fantastic, you’re not funny and you have no desire to bed strange women in hotels? (I’m hopeful that anyone who enjoyed the movie on that level can go waste their money on tiny splashes of white wine in fishbowl-sized glasses.) It’s not. This movie is about how funny the nonsense is, whether it’s a duck-fat lollipop or two grown men shouting “YOU WERE ONLY SUPPOSED TO BLOW THE BLOODY DOORS OFF!” at random times in competing Cockney accents. Neither needs to be fluffed up with extra so-called depth and seriousness. In the right context, both can be strange, different — and quite entertaining.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.