If, when This Is Spinal Tap was released, someone had suggested that, 41 years later, the same team would deliver a sequel, that oracle would have been treated as a gibbering lunatic. The notion of an act still rocking into their 60s – not to mention their 80s – would have been seen as absurd. The first film was, after all, already dealing with an “ageing band”.
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues arrives three years after Paul McCartney – who has an amusing extended cameo – headlined Glastonbury at 80. Ozzy Osbourne, frail at 76, took to the stage mere months before his recent death. We may not need a first big-screen Spinal Tap sequel – the straight-to-video The Return of Spinal Tap, from 1992, doesn’t count – but we surely do need a satire on geriatric stadium rock.
Like every other critic on the planet, I had the words “s**t sandwich” loaded and ready to discharge. How delightful to be proven wrong. You won’t need to be told The End Continues is not as funny or ground-breaking as This Is Spinal Tap. What is? But the new film is irresistibly charming in its pondering of the way old friends can age with dignity.
Dignity? Spinal Tap? Hear me out. Marti DiBergi (Rob Reiner), still with now-vintage viewfinder around neck, has rejoined us to make a film about a Tap reunion gig in New Orleans.
The three key members have spread to the winds. Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) runs a cheese shop in Berwick-upon-Tweed – shades of Alex James from Blur there – when not blasting power chords with a local folk group. David St Hubbins (Michael McKean) composes music for podcasts and on-hold phone messages from his home in central California. Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), curator of a glue museum, has recently presented a choral symphony called Hell Toupé. (Say it out loud.) None requires much persuasion to make the trip to Louisiana.
Reiner and the band, all credited as writers, satisfactorily blend an embrace of the old gags with a canny understanding of what has changed. In 1984, Ian Faith, Tap’s manager, had a boorish swagger then still common at the Fillmore West. In the 21st century they get a philistine smoothie who wants the group to take lessons from choreographed K-pop. Chris Addison’s oleaginous creation – he thinks it would be useful for one member to die on stage – could only have “Simon” as a forename.
On a more positive note, the most likely person to occupy the cursed drummer’s seat turns out to be a young lesbian whose open-mindedness puts the lads’ crustiness in relief. Some things get better.
What really distinguishes The End Continues, however, is the creators’ decision to lean deeply into ageing. None of these actors is in his first (or fifth) flush of youth, but they happily slap on make-up and curl backs to appear considerably more decrepit.
David and Nigel’s confusions now take on a real poignancy. Is the muddle down to their perennial stupidity or to the cruel pressures of ageing? Disputes need to healed more quickly, as this may be the last chance of reconciliation. A late flashback will have a few eyes dampening.
None of which is to suggest the film backs away from great gags that, as it was in 1984, continue deep into hilarious improvisation over the end credits. We do not know on which day God created The End Continues, but we are pleased He did not rest then also.
In cinemas from Friday, September 12th
