Spinal Tap II: The End Continues review: 'the laughter comes nowhere close to being turned up to 11'
This very belated sequel to the 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap is overly reliant on veteran rock star cameos and call-backs to the first film, writes Alistair Harkness
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (15) ★★
Perhaps the best that can be said about Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is that this belated sequel to the groundbreaking mockumentary This is Spinal Tap accurately captures the resigned sense of disappointment that can come from seeing a once-favourite rock band cynically regroup as a cash-grabbing legacy act.
Having run the gag of being a spoof heavy metal band into the ground in the 1990s (when they released an actual album and took part in a Freddie Mercury tribute gig at Wembley), and then again in the 2000s (when they played Glastonbury to promote the film’s 25th anniversary DVD release), Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer’s return as Spinal Tap’s heroically idiotic core members Nigel Tufnel, David St Hubbins and Derek Smalls does, admittedly, raise the occasional indulgent smile.
Sadly, however, the laughter comes nowhere close to being turned up to 11, overly reliant as it is on veteran rock star cameos (Paul McCartney, Lars Ulrich, Elton John) and call-backs to that first unimpeachable classic, the 40th anniversary of which this film misses by a year.
That this might actually be the best conceptual joke in the film doesn’t say much for returning director Rob Reiner, who reprises his own dual role as the film-within-the-film’s documentary maker — or if you will, rockumentary maker — Marty DiBergi.
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Reconnecting with the band to document their reunion as they gear up for a contractually obligated final concert, Reiner-as-DiBergi weaves the fictional legacy of that first film into this one, sentimentalising it in the process as he tries to cheat his way to some pathos by zeroing in on a bunch of ageing has-beens whose encroaching sense of their own mortality may finally have put too much perspective on things for their friendship to survive their own permanently wounded egos.
Inevitably, most of the jokes are built around the band’s historic bad luck with drummers and stage props (Stonehenge gets an extended reprise). But where the first film was an affectionate, heavily ironised skewering of both the pomp of the male-dominated rock scene (“What’s wrong with being sexy?”) and the first wave of rock-docs mythologising the industry (all involved were nothing if not good students of The Last Waltz, Don’t Look Back and Gimme Shelter), the new one doesn’t really have a juicy target. Instead it picks at some pretty low hanging fruit, with The Thick of It’s Chris Addison on board for a going-nowhere, if unintentionally apt, turn as a music-hating, revenue-obsessed suit drafted in to squeeze every last quid out of Spinal Tap’s last hurrah.
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is in cinemas from 12 September
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