The Lackluster Return of Spinal Tap
That The End Continues keeps going back to the primal scene for gags is fair enough: It’s rich terrain. There are so many callbacks, though, that the movie starts to resemble a feedback loop—a recursive structure that not only drains the first movie’s batteries but exposes the basic lack of urgency at the core of this follow-up. Marty DiBergi, it seems, needs closure, and maybe for somebody to give him some money as well. OK, but what’s Reiner’s excuse? Instead of resurrecting Spinal Tap to stick it to a music industry currently beholden to algorithms and fanatical stans, the filmmakers duly name-check a few present-tense phenomena—K-Pop, TikTok, #MeToo—while eschewing anything like a critical perspective.
If the joke is supposed to be that these septuagenarian-plus characters are too solipsistic and set in their ways to really acknowledge the world around them, it unfortunately boomerangs back on their creators, who seem checked out to the point that their practiced three-way interplay, at its best a thing of beauty, is mostly for naught. In This Is Spinal Tap, the battle of wills between Nigel and David for artistic control of the band was not only amusing but dramatically legible. Here, the reasons for the duo’s latest falling-out are withheld for so long that the revelation can’t possibly meet our expectations (it doesn’t). The whole thing is also weirdly low-energy from start to finish. Whether Reiner and his editors simply didn’t have enough good takes to choose from or fumbled the assembly is hard to say, but there’s no shape to the proceedings—no sense of momentum or mounting suspense as the show draws nearer. In Guest’s wonderful A Mighty Wind, the mystery of whether or not the old folkies played by Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara would finally kiss and make up onstage was yoked to larger currents of Boomer-era angst and regret. Leaving aside the tender emotions evoked by seeing beloved actors in their dotage (Shearer is 81), it never seems like anything is at stake.
For all its faults as a comedy—not being very funny chief among them—there is still a level on which The End Continues is compelling, and even beguiling. The pleasure of watching veteran performers playing together, in the studio and onstage, is real, and it cuts through the feebleness of the routines about cheese shops and glue museums. In fact, it almost makes one wish that Spinal Tap and its handlers had forgotten about exploding drummers and Elton John and Stonehenge and opted instead to toss a real curveball at their audience: a conventional, behind-the-scenes documentary about McKean, Guest, and Shearer preparing to perform a Spinal Tap concert in character. Such a setup would be fascinating and inherently prone to plenty of truth-and-fiction slippage, with built-in shivers of nostalgia and camaraderie; it could function, conceptually, as a true B-side to This Is Spinal Tap (shades of Derek Smalls’s experimental “jazz odyssey”) and avoid the forced, desultory vibes on display here. This Is Spinal Tap was vicious in its way, but there was affection in it, with a robust and persuasive ratio of passion to pastiche. The End Continues feints at rich, elegiac emotions but never quite accesses them. To quote yet another venerable Englishman, a bad cover version of love is not the real thing.
