{"id":150662,"date":"2025-09-12T04:58:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T04:58:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/150662\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T04:58:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T04:58:11","slug":"spinal-tap-2-might-not-go-to-11-but-it-still-rocks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/150662\/","title":{"rendered":"Spinal Tap 2 might not go to 11, but it still rocks."},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIt\u2019s such a fine line between stupid and, uh\u00a0\u2026 \u201d opines David St.\u00a0Hubbins (Michael McKean) in Rob Reiner\u2019s epochal 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. In a rare instance of being less slow-witted than his bandmate, Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) steps in to supply the missing adjective: \u201cclever.\u201d Forty-one years later, the fictional hard-rock supergroup is back to toeing that line in Spinal Tap\u00a0II, with Reiner once more at the helm and Harry Shearer joining McKean and Guest by returning as bassist Derek Smalls, the self-described \u201clukewarm water\u201d between the sparring guitarists\u2019 \u201cfire and ice.\u201d Knowing that the band is back together, with a few new songs to add to the pantheon of such hits as \u201cSex Farm\u201d and \u201cGimme Some Money,\u201d can\u2019t help but be extra-loud music to the ears of anyone who grew up with This Is Spinal Tap on repeat in both their living rooms and their brains.<\/p>\n

That movie\u2019s enduring popularity\u2014it\u2019s routinely included on lists of the all-time best film comedies<\/a>, and sometimes on lists<\/a> of the all-time best films<\/a>, period<\/a>\u2014proves that you don\u2019t have to be of the generation that watched it upon release to be able to quote it by heart. But as someone who was a teenager when it came out and found it perhaps the funniest movie I had ever seen, I can lay claim to being a Tap originalist. I didn\u2019t realize at the time that Spinal Tap the band had preceded Spinal Tap the movie by several years: McKean and Guest, friends and collaborators since they met in college in the 1960s, created the band for a one-song sketch<\/a> on a TV comedy special in 1979. Reiner, who appeared on the same show in the guise of celebrity DJ Wolfman Jack, thought highly enough of the ersatz British metal gods that he made them the subject of his directorial debut five years later. The mockumentary was not a brand-new form\u2014in 1978, the made-for-TV movie All You Need Is Cash had poked similar fun at the Beatles via a fake band known as the Rutles\u2014but it was Spinal Tap\u2019s massive success on home video, and the brilliance with which it spoofed the rock and rockumentary clich\u00e9s of its time, that made faux documentary the arguably too-ubiquitous comedy genre it\u2019s become.<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s because of that now-overfamiliar format that, from the jump, Spinal Tap\u00a0II feels less urgent than its predecessor. There is also the fact that, over the past 40 years in the fictional Spinal Tap\u2013verse, Tap has become a beloved classic-rock act, spoken of with reverence\u2014and, as we\u2019ll get to, sometimes jammed along with\u2014by luminaries like Paul McCartney and Elton John. (The participation of these real-life rock legends is perhaps no surprise when you consider that the original film has spent the intervening decades in regular rotation on tour buses.) The first movie showed us the band as a pack of already-aging rockers struggling to hang on to their relevance while reduced to opening for children\u2019s puppet shows; now that they can effortlessly fill a stadium while enjoying the esteem of their most successful peers, what worlds are left for the band to conquer?<\/p>\n

This new movie, co-written, like the first, by Reiner, McKean, Guest, and Shearer, never quite answers that question, but it more than earns its 84 minutes of running time (two minutes longer than the original) thanks to the cast\u2019s still-sharp powers of improvisation and songcraft. The soundtrack includes a lineup of new and old songs, all written and performed by the actors, whose musicianship alone lifts the rehearsal and performance scenes above similar moments in many a non-spoof rock biopic.<\/p>\n

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Spinal Tap\u00a0II\u2019s premise is that, because of a contractual debt the musicians owe to their new manager (Kerry Godliman), the band must reunite to play one last stadium show in New Orleans. After a feud whose cause remains unclear until the movie\u2019s final scenes, David and Nigel have not spoken in 15 years, and all three band members have fallen out of touch. None of them is living like a king, but they\u2019ve all found relative stability and fulfillment. David is a freelance composer who specializes in hold music; showing off his home studio to returning director Marty DiBergi (Reiner), he proudly plays the theme that won him a \u201cHoldie.\u201d Derek is the owner and proprietor of a museum specializing in the history of glue. And Nigel\u2014true to his projection, back in the first movie, that he could see himself ending up as some sort of shopkeeper\u2014runs a quaint small-town business called Guitars and Cheese, where those two commodities can be either purchased or exchanged via barter.<\/p>\n

When the Tap boys reunite in a rented rehearsal space in New Orleans, both they and we are startled by how old they\u2019ve gotten (and to their credit, the still-spry threesome of McKean, Guest, and Shearer are game to look far more enfeebled than they do in real life, via unflattering wigs and makeup and an impressive array of hideous shirts). It takes them a few sessions to get back in the groove, especially with an intrusive new publicist (Chris Addison) forever popping in with ideas that are literally tone-deaf: He suffers from a disorder that makes him unable to hear music.<\/p>\n

The first order of business is to find a new drummer, given that percussionists for the band have a long history of mysterious deaths; asked how many drummers they\u2019ve lost now, Nigel proffers a figure from what\u2019s become the first movie\u2019s most quoted line: \u201c11.\u201d After considering candidates that include the Roots\u2019 Questlove and Metallica\u2019s Lars Ulrich, they finally hire Didi Crockett (Valerie Franco), a bleach-blond punk firebrand with an irrepressibly upbeat attitude. Franco, a real-life professional drummer and music podcaster, is a wonderful find who should have been given more comic material to work with. In one of the movie\u2019s least funny moments, she gets hit on by Derek just moments before introducing the band to her girlfriend. The joke is intended to be on Derek, not Didi, and there\u2019s thankfully no homophobic humor upon the reveal that the band\u2019s new member is gay, but the script seems to underestimate how poorly such a gag reflects on a male character in the post-#MeToo era; it\u2019s hard to feel the same about the usually gentle, Ringo-like Derek after he\u2019s come on to his brand-new colleague in their workplace. It\u2019s one of the few moments when the movie itself, rather than the rock machismo it\u2019s sending up, seems stuck in the sexual politics of the past.<\/p>\n

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The Spinal Tap Sequel Might Not Quite Go to 11, but That\u2019s Not to Say It Doesn\u2019t Rock
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The movie\u2019s best scenes by far come when the band is just sitting around noodling, arguing about chord changes or singing an old folk tune in three-part a cappella harmony. These scenes\u2019 improvisatory looseness, the way they make wasting time into a virtue, sometimes put me in mind of Get Back<\/a>, Peter Jackson\u2019s sprawling documentary about the Beatles\u2019 rehearsal sessions for Let It Be. In the decades since the first movie, Spinal Tap has continued to play and tour intermittently as a band, with the result that the principals now understand their characters, and themselves as performers, better than they did in 1984. In addition to dusting off the classics from the first movie, the soundtrack includes some songs from the 1992 Tap album Break Like the Wind. Tap superfan McCartney drops in to play along with the boys on \u201cCups and Cakes\u201d (the B-side to \u201cGimme Some Money\u201d), while Elton John provides more than a cameo, joining the band both in the rehearsal room and for the climactic concert performance. A photo shoot in a cemetery inspires the ever-philosophical Derek to grapple with his mortality by writing a new song, the memorably titled \u201cRockin\u2019 in the Urn.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spinal Tap\u00a0II\u2019s scanty, improvisation-based script means that the story is short on suspense or forward movement; this is a gentle, nostalgic collection of sketches that riff on a four-decade-long experiment in musical and comic collaboration. Many of the press appearances<\/a> the director and cast have been making in character are as funny as, or funnier than, the jokes captured on-screen here. But though it never reaches the heights of the original\u2014if that film went to 11, this one tops out at around 7.5\u2014Spinal Tap\u00a0II also never feels like a soulless cash grab or a betrayal of the first movie\u2019s impish comic spirit. In the closing moments of the 1984 film, McKean\u2019s character is asked to write his future epitaph; after a solemn pause, he suggests \u201cHere lies David St.\u00a0Hubbins\u2014and why not?\u201d If you\u2019re not a hardcore Tap-head, there might not be a reason this is a must-see, but all these years later, with the band still rocking and no epitaphs necessary, why not?<\/p>\n

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