Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
(USA, 83 min.)
Dir. Christopher Guest
Just about every musician from the classic rock scene gets a boomer nostalgia documentary these days. It’s therefore only appropriate that the old farts from Spinal Tap get their turn, too. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues picks up with the eccentric rockers from the British band 41 years after their first film changed the landscape for mockumentary.
The motley crew doesn’t miss a beat here. Spinal Tap II is equal parts fan service and quality cheese. The latter largely comes from Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), who enjoys post-fame life by running a quaint little shop that buys and sells cheese and guitars. It’s a novel slice of Spinal Tap intelligence, as he exchanges both goods at face value by spit-balling their weight. There’s no mention of value for fragrances, but Nigel’s nose was surely blown by too many lines of coke.
Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), however, survives by his nose and whatever intoxicants he inhales at his glue emporium, which houses ancient adhesives like turtle-based glue. Meanwhile, David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) keeps a foot in the music biz more so than his fellow Tappers do. But he plays gigs that are rather beneath him, like birthday party mariachi bands, as do the other guys. Spinal gets tapped for a big stage comeback, however, when a cancelled stadium booking for Stormy Daniels leaves a promoter in the lurch.
With the gang reunited, Spinal Tap gets back in the swing. Director Martin DiBergi and, by extension, Spinal Tap II director Rob Reiner, has obviously seen many of these boomer music docs in which aged pros revisit their greatest hits and strum their guitars while waxing nostalgic. The novelty here is that documentary itself now parrots the parody: the very thing that the original Spinal Tap pioneered in mock doc form for laughs now serves as the template for music doc convention. There’s a brilliant level of comedic irony here with the joke becoming the industry standard. Spinal Tap flips the cliché upon itself with a bunch of self-referential gags, offering a music film that audiences have seen many times before—if only because they got it right first.
The return reheats several highlights from the original, although rarely with the same spark. Guest’s iconic “it goes to 11” bit with Nigel’s speakers finds a 2025 counterpart with the rocker’s pedal board. Nigel demonstrates some funky modifiers for his electric guitar, which add ear-splitting reverb and pitches shriller than Yoko Ono could achieve, but the gag simply calls to mind a better original. Spinal Tap II finds its best laughs with new material, often landing with its insights about staying alive in a competitive field.
All the greatest hits are there, from “Stonehenge” to “Big Bottom Girl,” and they’re funny as ever, if lacking the element of surprise that makes them so wild in the original. The End Continues also situates itself well in the canon of unnecessary sequels with a token new character to freshen the dynamic and a gaggle of celebrity cameos to up the ante. Of the former, Spinal Tap milks its high turnover rate among drummers as the band seeks a replacement. Finding a new recruit when everyone in the drummer seat has a history of dying on the job proves no easy feat, although Tap’s manager thinks one fatality or two might be good publicity. (For the survivors, anyway.)
Of the latter, Tap’s quest for a drummer replacement leads to Zoom calls with the likes of Questlove, Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Metallica’s Lars Ulrich, while Paul McCartney makes a surprise appearance in the recording studio and Elton John helps kick a performance of “Stonehenge” up to greater heights of lunacy. Elton nearly steals the show, but Guest, Shearer, and McKean remain the original dark princes of rockumentary. Having continued to work together on films like Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and Waiting for Guffman, they play like a band. There’s a natural rapport to their screen dynamic with Guest being especially funny at playing the fool.
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues never goes to 11, but it also doesn’t seem to try to crank it that high. It’s a comfortably enjoyable seven, as the senior rockers play their steady set. The film randomly ends quite abruptly too. It’s as if the guys got their coverage, seemed fine with the results, and called it a day before bedtime.
