Spinal Tap II: The End Continues

Everyone’s favourite ersatz heavy metal band is well and truly put back together for a sequel to one of the cultiest films ever cultivated, 1984’s groundbreaking and enormously influential mock-rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. They’re strapping on their axes and slogging through their greatest hits one more time, aiming their satirical rapiers at a music industry that’s since changed beyond all recognition.

Director Rob Reiner has duly boned up on developments in the visual grammar of documentary film-making over the last forty years. He shoots on HD digital rather than vérité celluloid, and uses handheld shakycam rather than fixed Super 16. Only the songs of witty editing patterns and improvised dialogue remain the same, and they’re both as sharp as they ever were.

Rather than insist upon itself by way of obvious punchlines or mugging to camera, the comedy tends to grow organically out of plot and character interactions. Naked Gun-style background sight gags are thrown away, dropped stitches in the ostensibly untidy fabric of the movie. The foreground jokes may be more carefully constructed, but in the same deadpan spirit, they’re so subtly delivered that you might miss them if you’re not paying attention.

The now-septuagenarian but still supremely well-drilled trio of creaky faux-rockers (who’ve reportedly struggled alongside Reiner through the mire of intellectual property law just to secure the rights to their own creation) have softened somewhat with age, giving their interpersonal rivalries and bickerings a mellower flavour. Although they gamble on audiences who remember the original movie having become equally sentimental with age, they’re not using our sympathy as ballast because they’re light on jokes.

Instead, the band members’ minor epiphanies of self-awareness and emotional availability deepen our attachment to them, while continuing to scour them for humane comedy. But just because the sense of humour has grown up a bit, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s matured; it simply scavenges the wreckage of a misspent youth for laughs with a more acquired taste.

Out of the new additions to the cast, Chris Addison’s tone-deaf concert promoter riffs almost actionably on pop svengali Simon Cowell, while Kerry Godliman imbues her role as the closest thing the story has to a conscience with some real bite. And the band’s eternally cursed search for a new drummer culminates in the firecracking form of newcomer Valerie Franco, lighting the proverbial fire under a band who, ironically, should be kept away from flammable materials.

As if they weren’t enough, a whole supergroup of real-life rock stars is liberally sprinkled throughout the narrative, running the risk of undermining the film-makers’ position as outsider parodists. After all, as the likes of Chris Morris or Sacha Baron Cohen demonstrated long ago, celebrity interviews are much funnier when the subject ISN’T in on the joke.

Having said that, Paul McCartney knowingly plays along both musically and comically, but then he has got form with this kind of thing – all the way back to 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night, in fact. By the time Elton John joins The Tap for a climactic death-defying rendition of “Stonehenge”, the good-natured warmth radiating from the film has earned it a little self-indulgent collaboration with a couple of rock ’n’ roll lifers.

Sequels usually signify creative bankruptcy – a transparent attempt to cash in on former glories by breast-feeding fans of the original with a slightly sourer dose of the same old milk. But it’s an inherently more interesting prospect when such a long time has elapsed between parts one and two, as changes in perspective and attitude might be reflected at a different angle. In comedy timing is everything, and Spinal Tap II is that rare sequel that’s waited so long to arrive that when it finally does, it’s more than welcome.

-Stew Mott-