What brilliant counterprogramming. For the Anglophile wives on a mission to see Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, here comes Spinal Tap II: The End Continues for those husbands who want to see something else. Comedy sequels 20 years later kept my expectations low…and if you do the same, Rob Reiner’s movie will give you the requisite chuckles just in time for your nap under 90 minutes later! Boy they really know their audience don’t they?
If you’ve never seen This Is Spinal Tap go immediately and watch that film before even considering this one. The End Continues does exactly that. Documentarian Marty DiBergi (Rob Reiner) goes in search of the Spinal Tap band members, who through a clause in their contract with now Hope Faith (Kerry Godliman), daughter of their previous manager, are obligated to do one last show. And so Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), and Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) end their years long hiatus to reunite for the farewell farewell tour in New Orleans.
The End Continues is too worn out to try to trailblaze like the 1984 movie did, so we just get the hits. Getting the band back together is the best stuff in this movie, as Reiner and Guest have a blast concocting new backstories for the band members. Each one has such a stupidly specific new life that I could have spent 5-10 more minutes filling in more details. Marty poking very obvious holes in each of the obtuse band members lives is the north star of this movie, watching Spinal Tap do mental flips to justify their oversights. This section of the movie allows for little cameos from the original film too, which had a sneaky amount of famous people in it. Nostalgia and stupidity works for comedies when deployed effectively, and for the most part Spinal Tap II does from the jump.
The meat of the movie though is the setup for the big New Orleans show. We get some new blood in the form of Tap’s 12th Drummer Didi Crockett (Valerie Franco) and concert promoter Simon Howler (Chris Addison). That’s just enough to inject the movie with some venom it desperately needs. The conversation between Simon and the band, finding the best way to cement the band’s “legacy” is the funniest scene in the movie, with how perfunctory and cruel it is. Making Simon willingly unable to understand music is a smart choice, turning him into the friction generator waltzing in complaining endlessly how he can’t promote 3 old guys sitting down playing music. Also injecting a little something to the proceedings are real music genius fans of the original, happy to participate in some of the song making, which some of the band members maybe or maybe don’t really appreciate. But at the core the movie would work if Guest, McKean, and Shearer tap into that special sauce they did in 1984. And more often than not, they find glimpses of that magic with their droll, deadpan deliveries and reaction shots. The movie finds an abrupt, but in my opinion, just right ending to get everyone out of there, chuckling, after 85 minutes.
File Spinal Tap II away for maybe December. You’re at home for the holidays, stuck with dad unclear what to do. By then, this will be streaming, so you can fire it up, and maybe double feature Downton Abbey with mom, kill two birds with one stone. Or you can try talking to them like an idiot.