It’s been more than 40 years since Rob Reiner’s mockumentary classic This Is Spinal Tap introduced pop culture to its most enduring fictional rockers, the eminently quotable long-haired bozos of the English metal band Spinal Tap (or Spın̈al Tap, if we’re being technical). The on-stage mishaps and backstage pretensions of Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), and their succession of bizarrely short-lived drummers have long since become a part of the popular lexicon, a byword for all things clumsy, stupid, and ridiculous in rock music. What began as a deadpan send-up of the twilight of cock rock has, over the decades, gone from a cult favorite to a cultural touchstone, transcending pure parody to become a kind of ironically iconic rock myth.
All the while, Spinal Tap has remained an on-and-off concern, with Guest, McKean, and Shearer periodically reprising their characters for albums, charity one-offs, reunion tours, and TV appearances. Inevitably, the act has become nostalgic, given that big, dumb, loud rock just isn’t the lowest-common-denominator cultural colossus that it was decades ago. But for satire, this is arguably more of an opportunity than a problem, because there’s plenty to make fun of about the state of classic rock culture circa the present day, whether it’s geriatric touring acts, hagiographic official biopics, or the whole algorithm-driven online world of viral guitar prodigies, pedal nerds, bass gurus, and slack-jawed album reactors. It’s U2 at the Sphere, it’s Bohemian Rhapsody, it’s the must-have $10,000 Klon.
But the belated sequel Spinal Tap II: The End Continues doesn’t take aim at any of these targets; in fact, it’s arguable whether it has any satirical targets at all. Dusting off his USS Ooral Sea cap, director and co-writer Reiner once again plays his on-screen alter ego, the hapless documentarian Marty Di Birgi, who has returned to film Spinal Tap’s final concert. As we learn early on, Spinal Tap remained a popular touring act well into the 2000s, when a mysterious falling out between childhood friends/guitarists Nigel and David broke up the band. The final show, which is scheduled for an arena in New Orleans, is a contractual obligation, stipulated in an obscure line of the band’s contract with their late, cricket-bat-swinging manager, Ian, which has since been inherited by his daughter, Hope (Kerry Godliman).
The first order of business is to reunite the core trio of the band, who have all tried to move on from the rock-star life. Nigel has become a cheesemonger. David is composing music for true-crime podcasts on his laptop. Derek, in the meantime, has opened a small museum dedicated to his lifelong passion for glue. (It’s one of the film’s better and more memorable extended bits.) Various supporting characters from This Is Spinal Tap are checked in on, in where-are-they-now fashion, before Nigel, David, and Derek convene in New Orleans to rehearse, audition a new drummer, and improv with assorted cameoing celebrities.
Despite the supposed bad blood between Nigel and David (which doesn’t really get addressed until the end), the scenes of the reunited band are curiously short on clashes, with most of the situational absurdity and comic friction coming by way of Simon Howler (Chris Addison), a PR hired gun who literally can’t understand music because of a rare medical condition (which he claims is an advantage in his line of work). Throughout, The End Continues depicts Spinal Tap as an improbably popular, beloved, and even admired band—a characterization that is starkly at odds with the original movie, which portrayed them as critical punching bags who end up second-billed to a puppet show. This is a part of the problem with the film: It is, in many ways, too beholden to an audience’s presumed fondness for the established Spinal Tap shtick to ever do anything interesting (or humiliating) with the characters. Another problem is a move away from the fly-on-the-wall verisimilitude that was one of This Is Spinal Tap‘s strengths, the sequel playing less like a parody of an actual rock documentary and more like one of those mockumentary TV sitcoms that the original largely influenced.
The core issue, however, is that it just isn’t very funny. At times, it even drags, with awkwardly dated topical references (crypto scams, Stormy Daniels, etc.), listless callbacks to jokes from the original film, and a few too many reverent, celebrity-assisted runthroughs of the Spinal Tap musical repertoire. Part of what made the original work as a character piece (and gave it a sizeable early following among rock musicians) was that the foibles and misadventures of the band were not too far removed from the experiences of real touring musicians: They got lost backstage, failed to sell tickets, got insulting reviews, chased trends, and had ambitions that clearly exceeded their sensibilities and appeal. Treating them like rock royalty—as Spinal Tap II: The End Continues so frequently does—takes away from what made them so memorable in the first place.
Director: Rob Reiner
Writer: Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Rob Reiner
Starring: Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Rob Reiner
Release Date: September 12, 2025
