‘Spinal Tap II: The End Continues’ Review: A Nostalgic Sequel to a Mockumentary Classic

Rob Reiner’s 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap may not have been a box office hit upon release, but success didn’t elude it for long. Quickly becoming a cult classic and endorsed as brutally accurate by scores of real-life musicians, the film depicts a fictional metal band at the moment when runaway ego and indulgent excess meet the harsh reality of dwindling popularity and all the indignity that comes with it. Sadly, the careful balance of, to quote Spinal Tap guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), “stupid and clever” that solidified its legend is less steady in its much-belated sequel, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.

Once again featuring director and co-writer Rob Reiner as documentarian Marty Di Bergi, the sequel follows the filmmaker as he documents efforts to reunite the band for a one-off concert. But Spinal Tap II stumbles out of the gate as it attempts to juggle two layers of reality: the one within the story where Spinal Tap were has-beens even in 1984, and the other our own, where the first film remains a venerated forerunner of the modern improv comedy.

The dissonance piles up fast as Marty discovers the members far gone from the spotlight, with Nigel playing folk music in pubs, singer David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) doing odd soundtrack work, and bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) moonlighting as an orchestra member. At the same time, Spinal Tap commands such reverence that stars on the caliber of Paul McCartney and Elton John make cameos enthusing about the band.

Perhaps counterintuitively, Spinal Tap II is at its best when leaning into the image of the band as beloved legends capable of selling out a large venue. Heavy metal has been resurgent globally for much of the 21st century, and Spinal Tap doesn’t look out of place enjoying revived interest. As the core trio and newly drafted session drummer Didi (Valerie Franco) rehearse for a New Orleans concert, some of the film’s strongest humor derives from how Nigel and David let infinitesimally petty friction threaten to derail what should be an easy, lucrative gig.

It comes as little surprise that Guest, McKean, and Shearer enliven the proceedings with a long-mastered command of making jokes sound like the characters’ earnest, absent-minded thoughts. When Marty first catches up with David, the latter boasts of scoring a horror film set in a nursing home and gives the title Night of the Assisted Living Dead with a lack of guile but a tinge of boastfulness. Later, all three of the leads pepper tense moments of rehearsal with muttered insults delivered with all the conniving venom of Richard III delivering an aside.

Even some of the celebrity ringers show some quick-thinking chops. McCartney brings the same naughty schoolboy wit he showed in interviews 60 years ago in a scene where he sits in with the band and gets into a testy exchange with David when his gentle advice about tightening up a loosely structured song instantly brings out the diva in the Tap member.

As for new additions to the cast around the leads, Chris Addison, a stand-out performer on the BBC satire The Thick of It, nearly steals the show as oily concert promoter Simon. At one point, he defiantly explains to Marty that he was born with a condition that makes him unable to process or retain music, which is actually an asset in his business.

Less successful is Reiner’s direction. Straddling a line between the kind of raw, classic style of documentary filmmaking that the original movie adhered to and the slick, over-produced quality of many contemporary documentaries, Spinal Tap II ends up with no real visual sense at all and feels like some of the latter-day seasons of NBC’s The Office, where the illusion of being a documentary started to break down. But there are some subtle aesthetic gags that land, especially in the sound mixing, which hilariously frontloads Nigel’s guitar and his dizzying array of pedalboard effects—each more annoying than the last—to ear-splitting decibels.

Sturdier than it has any right to be, Spinal Tap II nonetheless feels long in the tooth even at 80 minutes thanks to being locked into the preparations for a single show instead of the broader recording/release/tour schedule shown in the original. Things come together beautifully at the end, though, in a concert sequence that manages to reconcile the disparate efforts to spoof the fake band and celebrate the real impact they’ve had by turning some of the classic Tap concert snafus on their head, only to wring a whole new level of travesty from the seeming success.