‘Spinal Tap II’ Review: Comedy Legends Play the Hits

The Rolling Stones 2024 world tour grossed $235 million. The fact that the Stones’ days as a trailblazing band are long behind them, or that several members of their classic lineup are dead or retired, doesn’t seem to matter to the Stones’ loyal fans. A famous group can make a very good living these days just by playing the hits for affluent fogeys.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is a playing the hits movie, and sometimes quite literally; all the best tracks in this sequel are the ones from 1984’s This Is Spinal Tap. The first Tap really did something groundbreaking. Its creators — writer/director Rob Reiner and stars and co-writers Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer — used improvised dialogue and handheld camera work to perfect the mockumentary form, which had been attempted by a few other filmmakers, but never quite so convincingly or hilariously.

Spinal Tap II reunites that same team for a pure nostalgia play. Like a modern day Stones concert, there are enough approximations of the glory days to allow fans to feel like they got their money’s worth. But no one’s going to mistake the things Tap’s doing today for the stuff they produced in their prime.

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Of course, the whole conceit of the original This Is Spinal Tap was that the band — David St. Hubbins (McKean), Nigel Tufnel (Guest), and Derek Smalls (Shearer) — was already past its prime 40 years ago. Documentarian Marty Di Bergi (Reiner) followed Spinal Tap, a once-beloved heavy metal act, as they toured America and basically faded into obscurity right on camera. Audiences dwindled, gigs got canceled, the band members fought, and their stage show, complete with impossibly small Stonehenge model, became a laughingstock.

As Spinal Tap II begins, the band has been broken up for 15 years under mysterious circumstances. They reluctantly reunite to fulfill one final contractually-mandated concert owed to to Hope Faith (Kerry Godliman), the daughter of their former manager. Di Bergi decides to make a new movie about the gig and tracks down Tap’s former members. He finds Tufnel running a shop that sells cheese and electric guitars, and occasionally barters one for the other, a ludicrous business model that Guest sells through sheer force of stone-faced will as he weighs a huge block of cheese in one hand and a Gibson in the other.

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Guest, who went on to direct a series of mockumentaries in the This is Spinal Tap mold, was always the funniest member of the group. That hasn’t changed; almost all of Spinal Tap II’s biggest laughs come from his tossed-off inanities. Unfortunately, while he doesn’t seem to have lost a step, the overall package does feel a bit creakier.

This time, the illusion that we’re watching a real rock band in the midst of a crisis is a lot less convincing. Where the first film followed Tap across the U.S., the sequel is mostly set in New Orleans but could be happening almost anywhere. The vast majority of Spinal Tap II takes place in a single recording studio where Tap’s members prepare for their reunion (and reignite some of their interpersonal tensions around their wives and girlfriends).

They sit around, play some songs, welcome a couple big-name musicians for cameo jams, and that’s about it. The addition of a Simon Cowell-esque concert promoter (Chris Addison) who wants to update Tap’s image, goes nowhere and yields zero payoff. (The same goes for the subplot about the band’s 2009 breakup.) The stakes couldn’t be much lower.

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But just like the Rolling Stones, the members of Spinal Tap have been around for so long, and have accrued so much goodwill, that their loyal audience (this writer included) will enjoy seeing them back together for the first time in decades. Yes, the plot is flimsy and the structure suggests very little effort; Tap spends so much time sitting around their studio that the evil promoter character actually asks them if they’re planning to stand up at some point in their reunion gig, which is meant as a cruel joke but feels like a fair question in context.

Nevertheless, the old comedic chemistry remains. It’s fun watching David, Nigel, and Derek struggle to answer Di Bergi’s blithering questions, or accidentally try on the wrong concert wardrobe, or field idiotic pitches from their managers about new merch concepts. (“Tap Water” is an idea with a lot of promise, I think.)

This Is Spinal Tap not only helped pioneer the mockumentary form, it was also an early example of cringe comedy. It invited us to laugh at these pompous rock stars with cucumbers stuffed down their trousers and their Stonehenge so tiny it was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf.

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By and large, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues goes for something much more affectionate, and sometimes even a little melancholy, as Derek, Nigel, and David, manifestly older than their glory days, ruminate in their quippy way about their impending deaths. You might ask how much more black could the humor in those scenes be. And the answer is none. None more black.

It’s nice to see Reiner, McKean, Guest, and Shearer acknowledge their age and have some fun again, even if they never come close to matching the invention and creativity of the old Spinal Tap. Forget about going to 11, though. This sequel barely goes to...

RATING: 6/10