BRIAN, MIKEY, RYAN AND CHRIS get to fish a lot. For big trout. In places you and I will likely never see. And somehow they manage to tote expensive film cameras with them everywhere, chronicling their expeditionary wanderings, misadventures, and glimpses of angling nirvana. It's a little bit like watching one of television's outdoors "reality shows," only the survivors don't get to vote on much of anything except who took the most gnarly cliff dive, what the most unreliable part of their devilishly poor choice of transportation is, and, of course, which rainbow over 10 pounds really was the piggiest.

This first installment of "The Trout Bum Diaries" is more than one and a half hours of film that cavorts south from Buenos Aires through Chile to Tierra del Fuego and then back north into Argentina. From large brook trout in the forests of northern Patagonia to overweight rainbows in high Chilean lakes to big steelhead and sea run browns in southern Argentina, the four anglers sample what must be some of the best fly fishing to be had in southern South America, in some of its remotest regions. At one point during the high desert Chilean segments, I started wondering whether the film shouldn't have been called "The Fat Rainbow Diaries." That was before the boys started horsing big steelhead and oversized brown trout after oversized brown trout out of the windswept Argentinean rivers.

The good film work in "Trout Bum Diaries" leaves a lingering sense of how special Patagonian fishing can be: the clearest of aquamarine mountain creeks, two-foot long brown trout in waters no larger than 10 feet wide, super-abundant spring creeks lacing wide barren vistas. There is so much footage of quintessential fishing here that you start to think it is almost inevitable.

Fortunately all four of the team, who did most of the filming and editing, are also fine fishermen. They pluck fish seemingly at will from a variety of waters. Whether intentional or not, though, the film shows them progressing from merely competent anglers at the beginning to virtuoso fly fishers near the end, when catching big fish in small water is merely a matter of putting down a sandwich to launch a long line out at a fish that made the mistake of showing himself midstream. After watching this DVD a couple of times, you may be convinced that all one needs to catch lots of big fish in Patagonia is time and an endless supply of Chernobyl Ants.

There are a few things about this film that will grate on many viewers, like the minimal and sometimes ineffective dialogue and the ever-present, overloaded musical score, which in many cases leaves you hitting the reverse button to see if what was said was really important. The team likes their music, all styles and all the time, jumping from blues to heavy metal to indigenous pop folk with hardly a connection to the storyline. And of course there is the obligatory cinematographic confusion regarding women and fish, fish and women.

Speaking of stories, there's not really one here, though you sense the potential in Ryan Davey's bronze dreadlocks and some of the out-takes which show a more personal angle on the team's efforts to overcome adversity. Perhaps there isn't a need for a storyline, but I found myself waiting for one to develop. Then I realized this was exactly the kind of movie I would have wanted to make when I was 25 years old — high on volume, low on tying up loose ends. Personally I'm going to hope that the next time around these talented guys will go a little further out on the edge and reveal what it is that makes them such fanatics. Maybe they won't need to drive 7000 miles to do it, but that's OK by me.