In Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, director Rob Reiner’s Marty Di Bergi catches up with Britain’s loudest band 16 years after their last reunion. Nigel (Christopher Guest) owns a cheese shop, Derek (Harry Shearer) a glue museum, and David (Michael McKean) composes mood music for true-crime podcasts. The newfound entrepreneurial spirit of the band isn’t the only thing that’s changed. Outside of the film, as their hair grayed, Spinal Tap assumed elder statesmanhood as jesters in the high court of establishment rock. It’s a complex position to hold, but as the End Continues brings the band back to the big screen for one final gig, the band succumbs to a familiar problem plaguing many comedy sequels: confusing reverence for humor.
The End Continues is by no means Spinal Tap’s first reunion. At this point, what started as a fictional band is as real as any legacy act, rejoining a couple of times a decade for no reason other than the enjoyment of its members and the little money there is to be made. Glimpses of that history pop up in the sequel, through clips of the band’s 1992 Albert Hall concert film, The Return Of Spinal Tap, and 2009 performances at the Glastonbury Festival and Wembley Arena in support of their Back From The Dead album. When we left them in This Is Spinal Tap, the band had just reached “big in Japan” status. In the intervening real-life years, the group has been joined by Jarvis Cocker, David Gilmour, Mick Fleetwood, and every member of Metallica.
Spinal Tap is simply a very different band from the last time audiences saw them on screen, and Spinal Tap II canonizes the last 40 years of reunions, making the film a legacy sequel in the truest sense: One that’s about legacy. But this was all born from This Is Spinal Tap, a mockumentary that relies on watching a band fade into obscurity shortly after they reach their height, and the cognitive dissonance that fuels their delusion. They struggle to connect the dots between canceled gigs in Boston (“It’s not much of a college town”) and the small bread in the green room. No matter how many times they fold the slices, it just doesn’t work. The bread breaks and the meat flops out the sides.
Now, Spinal Tap is adored—with no shortage of praise for the film or McKean, Guest, Shearer, and Reiner’s creation—and it throws the entire sequel off its axis. They never manifested in the off-screen world as something like Anvil, the Canadian one-hit-wonder metalhead lifers of Anvil! The Story Of Anvil, a documentary hailed as a real-life Spinal Tap when it came out in 2008. Instead of continuing to ignore their collapsing careers, the band spends much of Spinal Tap II in the studio, fielding FaceTime calls from QuestLove and Lars Ulrich and lapping up adulation from Paul McCartney and Elton John. A new drummer, Didi Crocket (Valerie Franco), loves them so much that she’s willing to risk their well-known drummer’s curse to fill in on the skins. Like too many legacy sequels—especially comedies—there’s a reverence for the original film that must be celebrated before one can even think about getting to the gags.
Comedy sequels are already tricky. Comedians often feel the need to heighten jokes that reached their apotheosis in the original movie; the Airplane becomes a space shuttle in Airplane II: The Sequel. But there’s a magic to the first time, seeing how the joke was built and pushed to its limits when the filmmakers believed it was their only shot to tell it. No joke can truly rely on clapter, a term coined by Seth Meyers for the low hanging fruit of head-nodding political comedy, but can be applied to nostalgic sequels begging for applause by playing the hits. But the allure of acknowledging the cultural import of a previously told joke is too great for some sequels to ignore.
In Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, it’s no longer enough to have Tim Robbins appear so the audience can wonder, “What is he doing here?” It needs VIPs Sacha Baron Cohen, Will Smith, Marion Cotillard, Liam Neeson, Jim Carrey, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Kanye West to fill out its News Team Battle Royale. Others, like Dumb And Dumber To, feel the need to call back every unexplored nook of tossed-aside jokes to fuel the plot, turning an unseen Fraida Felcher into a central part of the plot. Ghostbusters: Afterlife turned nostalgia for Ghostbusters into the film’s emotional spine, resulting in the ghoulish sight of Harold Ramis’ ghost making a guest appearance in the film’s finale. While this reverence for hits can earn quick returns at the box office, the tail of these sequels is short. At this point, Dumb And Dumber To might be less remembered than the 2005 prequel, Dumb And Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd.
Spinal Tap II also attempts to restage old jokes, not by adding depth but by making them bigger and louder, particularly in the film’s final moments. Heightening the last film’s comically small stage prop, the band’s gigantic Stonehenge set is revealed as the band performs “Stonehenge” with Elton John. It’s not funnier, but it is definitely bigger and satisfies anyone in the audience screaming requests for the song. Still, for a brief second, it feels like the whole film is building toward the massive prop killing all three members and finding grim irony in the drummer leaving unscathed. Alas, they merely break their legs. The end really does continue.
There’s simply nothing funny about having respect for the past. It’s probably why the year’s first good legacy comedy sequel, 2025’s The Naked Gun, quickly gets its crying out of the way before resetting the character back to the film’s base reality. This Is Spinal Tap is a classic because of its irreverent drubbing of the self-serious rockers that have always dominated the screen, from The Last Waltz to Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster and beyond. Now earnestly bought into its own bit, Spinal Tap has lost its ability to spoof anything other than itself—and it’s too respectful to even do that.
