Elizabeth McGovern and Hugh Bonneville in Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale
DOWNTON ABBEY: THE GRAND FINALE and SPINAL TAP II: THE END CONTINUES
Little of actual import happens in either Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale or Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, two sequels – and theoretically climactic ones – to culturally beloved properties that happened to debut on the same day. (Had they arrived one week earlier, the films could've shared an opening weekend, and made an unofficial three-fer, with The Conjuring: Last Rites.) It's doubtful, though, that their fan bases will complain much.
Like its 2019 and 2022 big-screen predecessors, the cozy British soap opera The Grand Finale appears to want only to amuse and pacify the clientele that made Downton Abbey such a cherished, six-season TV destination, and if the sniffles and gentle chuckles in my auditorium were any indication, at least a few dozen attendees left feeling fulfilled. I'd love to say that my fellow patrons at The End Continues were equally satisfied with the Spinal Tap reunion, but after our screening, I failed to check in with either of them. I, however, had a blast, and if I didn't have as good a time at the latest/last Downton, that's principally because I'd trade Lady Mary donning expensive frocks for the world's loudest band performing “Hell Hole” any day of the week. Yet my preference for director/co-writer/co-star Rob Reiner's comedic rockumentary over director Simon Curtis' and screenwriter Julian Fellowes' tasteful period adieu, I think, isn't merely about personal preference. Weirdly, both sequels cover much of the same thematic terrain, as they're largely about what it means to reach the end of one's life – or at least, one's livelihood. Only one of them, though, really addresses what it means to be old, and despite the plethora of seniors in its cast, it ain't The Grand Finale. I momentarily choked up at Curtis' and Fellowes' wrap-up; seeing Maggie Smith onscreen again will do that to a guy. But I full-out wept at one pivotal moment in the Tap, because unlike its cineplex partner – part of a franchise that could conceivably run forever – this one feels like a truly deserved, if unnecessary, Happily Ever After.
For the record, I enjoyed both previous Downton movies, as well as the first two years of the Emmy-winning series before I jumped ship early into season three. And while it wouldn't have been the worst thing in the world for this IP to retire in conjunction with last September's passing of Dame Maggie, there's certainly pleasure to be had in the returns of so many other familiar faces. I just wish that Fellowes, on this purportedly last merry-go-round ride, gave these people better things to do.
Not that The Grand Finale is wanting for incident. The year is now 1930, and all sorts of narrative balls are in the air. Robert and Cora Crawley (Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern), Earl and Countess of the Downton estate, are contemplating a move to the less lavish Dower House … though why they can't live out their days at the Abbey isn't adequately explained. (It definitely has enough room for them.) Following her recent divorce, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is now a social pariah. Trusted cook Beryl (Lesley Nicol) is in the process of training assistant Daisy (Sophie McShera) to replace her. Cora's brother Harold (Paul Giamatti) arrives to discuss a business proposition alongside his oily financial advisor Gus (Alessandro Nivola), who emerges as perhaps the least surprising turncoat in modern cinema.
There's plenty more, some of it involving widely adored figures: no-longer-conniving Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael); former butler Carson (Jim Carter); his wife and Downton housekeeper Elsie (Phyllis Logan); valet John Bates (Brendan Coyne); his lady's-maid wife Anna (Joanne Froggatt); the late Lady Sylvia's widower Tom Branson (Allen Leech); and comic-relief punching bag Moseley (Kevin Doyle). The incandescent Penelope Wilson also takes part, with her Lady Merton looking rather understandably lost without Smith's dowager countess to spar with. Oh yeah, and semi-scandalous lovers Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier) and his actor beau Guy Dexter (Dominic West) show up, along with Noël Coward (Arty Froushan), who just might have an idea for a new stage play when, during a party, one of the servants makes mention of the Downton denizens' “private lives.” Take that, Forrest Gump and your “Shit Happens” T-shirt!
Clearly, this is a lot. Yet somehow, it's still not enough. Devoid of a single storyline to equal the juiciness of 2022's Hollywood-comes-to-England B-plot in A New Era, Fellowes' script attempts to drum up interest and investment through conceits that, quite simply, don't generate any suspense. Will Lady Mary's cardinal sin of adultery be forgiven? Of course. Will Gus be revealed as the heel that he is? Of course. Will Robert Crawley grudgingly realize that the times they are a-changin' and he'll be forced to change with them? Duh. Yet while the film busies itself with these matters, it forgets to give us information and resolutions that, having come to care for these characters, some of us might really want. How does Mary's young son George, unseen until the final minutes, respond to the idea that Downtown Abbey will one day be his? Considering that physical ailments forced him to retire several films ago, how is Carson's health these days? Why, with so much screen time devoted to Daisy's anxiety over finally preparing a lavish dinner-party meal on her own, do we not get a single moment of anyone enjoying said meal and giving Daisy the praise she desperately needs? Beryl tearfully telling the young woman “You're the daughter I never had” is a guaranteed waterworks-inducer. But would it have killed one of the Crawleys for a single note reading “Nice soup, Daisy!”
I can't begrudge anyone's good time at this Downton, and I'm sure a few folks in my auditorium felt like applauding when Giamatti all but turned to the camera and verbalized the franchise mission statement that sometimes it's preferable to live in the past rather than the present. (I hope said viewers at least winced, as I did, when Doyle's nascent wordsmith Mosely did look into the camera when saying that screenwriters were the true stars of Hollywood.) But for a film subtitled The Grand Finale, there's strangely very little that's Grand about it, as business-as-usual appears to be the working motif. Forget the enjoyably nasty season-one highs of lady's maid O'Brien intentionally causing Cora to miscarry and that visiting official dying while on top of Lady Mary. (After the woman reveals another unwise conquest here, Edith's aghast reaction – “Was he Turkish?!” – inspires the film's biggest laugh.) This entry reserves its naughtiness for one scene of Elsie and Beryl giggling over the loveliness of sex, and one moment of Dexter running his hand along his male lover's back. And this movie has Noël Coward in it! Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale is gorgeous, amusing, moderately touching, and agreeable as hell. It just isn't in any way interesting.
By contrast, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is nothing but interesting, even if part of your interest lies in why the movie isn't making you laugh as much as you want to. Set in the present, this followup to 1984's peerless This Is Spinal Tap wastes no time reuniting us with that film's four-man team of co-stars, co-screenwriters, and, with one exception, musicians: Rob Reiner's documentary filmmaker Marty Di Bergi, and the fading metal-heads Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), and Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer). A clause in the rockers' apparently lifelong contract owned by now-deceased manager Ian Faith requires that the guys perform one last show together, even though it's been 15 years since the bandmates even spoke. So off we go for one more round with the musicians who are now in their 70s or 80s as they prepare for a one-night-only New Orleans reunion for adoring Spinal Tap fans, of which there are still many. I'm among them, as are all sentient beings among my age that I'm still in contact with. Needless to say, the stakes for this thing were high, and I wasn't alone in worrying that The End Continues would be a dumpster fire of perhaps unforgivable magnitude. Fear not, fellow fans: It's not at all. It's just not what many of us were anticipating – and, I'd argue, it's a better movie for that.
This Is Spinal Tap boasted no end of unforgettable bits, so it's a little odd that Reiner's decades-later continuation feels the need to keep reminding us of them. I did appreciate the super-brief returns of June Chadwick, Fran Drescher, and Paul Shaffer, the latter of whose cameo, more than 20 minutes into the 83-minute film, elicited my first out-loud chuckle in his 20 seconds of screen time. Too often, though, set pieces seem to only recall stronger, tighter versions of gags now being re-staged, with none of the participants, for empathetic reason, being able to improvise quite as quickly or formidably as they did 41 years ago. Watching Nigel school Marty on the niceties of his inexplicable foot-pedal system is kinda fun, yet doesn't diminish memories of how much more fun it was when sweetly simpleminded Nigel was steadfast in explaining that his particular sound system went to 11. While there wind up being a number of giggles in The End Continues, none of them go to 11. Turns out, at least for me, that doesn't much matter.
To be clear, I will happily concede to, and most likely agree with, anyone's complaints about The End Continues. The four leads don't appear quite as improvisationally sharp as they used to be. Shearer's re-acquaintance with his British accent is dicey, at best. Enough isn't done with the one-night-only-concert scenario. (Why don't we get a single scene of the show being marketed to a 2025 audience?) The scene of Tap trying to Zoom-recruit potentially ill-fated drummers including Questlove, Chad Smith, and Lars Ulrich goes on way too long, and isn't funny besides. Potentially intriguing subplots involving the group's new promoter (a topnotch Chris Addison) and David's long-held resentment toward Nigel don't lead anywhere significant. There are no new memorable songs. I cop to all of this. I also barely care, because there's so much that's good, even great, about Spinal Tap II that I'm afraid initially hesitant viewers such as myself might miss how supremely moving this reunion tour becomes as it reaches its crescendo.
Earlier in this article, I referenced a specific moment in Reiner's sequel that made me lose it, and I don't think it's a spoiler to say it came during a performance of “Stonehenge,” the Celtic tribute that was such a source of embarrassment for the rockers in '84. Because, c'mon – you knew the band was gonna reprise that one, along with “Big Bottom” and “The Flower People” and a number of other earworms. But while this sequel replays most of the Tap hits, it tends to do so in ways that also re-imagine them, either through recording-session performances or on-the-fly rehearsals – none of the songs, as is appropriate, sounding quite like you've heard before. That's because the musicians aren't who they were before. Now retired from touring rock, they've moved on – though all three Spinal Tap members are still making music on their own iffy terms – and there's something ineffably moving about the sight of former bandmates and besties not only creating musical magic but personal magic together. In that climactic New Orleans concert, McKean exudes the radiant joy of a man who had previously given up hope of having any left within him, and with his droopy eyes and jowls and fierce determination to make this Last Hurrah count, he's almost indescribably inspiring.
Fully understanding that I'll sound like a hypocrite, the stakes in Spinal Tap's return are perhaps even lower than those for Downton's incessantly well-off Crawley clan and their cheerfully subservient staffers, and should therefore generate even less rooting interest. But it sure didn't feel that way. I was enchanted by the hire of Tap's new, fiercely gifted drummer (Valerie Franco), who was taking every precaution to make sure she didn't die as the group's 11 former drummers did. (A wonderful detail: the fire extinguisher placed alongside her drum set, evidently in case of another spontaneous combustion.) I understood how easily, yet warily, Nigel, David, and Derek reunited, which made perfect emotional sense after 15 years apart given a decades-long professional and personal friendship. I liked how more than five minutes apiece were devoted to the band's jam sessions with Sirs Paul McCartney and Elton John, which aren't terribly funny, yet which radiate so much mutual respect and artistic joy that you'd wish they would go on forever. And I freaking loved our view of the climactic concert, which shows three genius comedian/musicians doggedly trying to replicate their artistic heights, and totally selling why Tap's SRO crowd is going nuts for them.
What these screaming fans didn't see were what Di Bergi's doc gives us direct access to: the panic of Addison's promoter as he realizes weeks have gone by with his concert stars only rehearsing while sitting down; John Michael Higgins showing up to get the aging boys involved in muscle-loosening exercises; David's crisis of conscience as a mid-rehearsal flare-up leads him to a truly underprivileged, equally aged musician doing his best to survive by busking in a back alley of New Orleans. No, I didn't laugh throughout Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. I honestly didn't expect to. But I did laugh. I grinned nearly constantly. And when I didn't, just like the film's aging figures who find contentment in one kickass jam none of them had cause to anticipate, I reflected on life, passion, and what it means to devote oneself to the ecstatic happiness of others. Now that's a grand finale.
THE LONG WALK
Not long into the merciless endurance competition that constitutes The Long Walk, an unnamed Major – the sadistic ringleader of an even-more-sadistic event – barks a question at the now-fewer-than-50 male youths who “volunteered” for his mission: “Where else on Earth will you find this kind of opportunity?” I actually had an immediate response for him: “Panem.”
Although the movie is based on a Stephen King novel (published under his pseudonym Richard Bachman) that debuted in 1979, there's no getting around the Hunger Games of it all: a dystopian landscape, stemming from another American Civil War, founded on gross financial inequity and the rise of totalitarianism; an annually televised contest involving the systematic execution of kids; arguments for the necessity of love under murderous circumstances; an actor with Philip Seymour Hoffman DNA. (The actual PSH in Mockingjay parts one and two; his son Cooper Hoffman here.) Like all but the Suzanne Collins franchise's first film in 2012, The Long Walk is also directed by Francis Lawrence, and effectively demonstrates what you'd get if a Hunger Games installment had an R rating, queasily upsetting violence, and, despite a surprising number of chuckles, nothing in the way of romantic levity. Although the material languished in Development Hell for decades and was considered by many to be unconquerable, Lawrence does an overall first-rate job with the task; his brutal thriller is scary, engaging, and moving, and boasts just enough Stand by Me to keep from being unendurable. But for a work whose very premise hardly promises fun, it gets less and less fun as it progresses, and when the end credits finally rolled after 108 increasingly harsh minutes, I wasn't cathartically wiped out so much as deeply relieved.
Set on some version of Earth, in some unspecified (distinctly rural) U.S. locale, with the few period trappings suggesting the 1960s or '70s, the long walk of the title is a yearly ritual in which one young man from all 50 states is picked by lottery to literally walk 'til he drops. The winner gets unfathomable riches and the granting of a wish; the other 49 will die either by injury, exhaustion, or being shot in the head by military officials should they wander off the paved course or drop their pace to below three mph. While it's stressed that the competition is volunteer-based, no one participating knows of a single individual who didn't register for the lottery – the Vietnam allegory, even in JT Mollner's hedgingly apolitical screenplay, is impossible to miss. But off they go, each more or less convinced that he'll be the sole survivor, and in the manner of any number of entertainments about troops during wartime, there are easily recognizable types.
Cooper Hoffman's Raymond Garrity is our audience surrogate: soulful, empathetic, literate, granted the film's sole flashback, and the only one with a relative we're allowed to meet. (Happy as I always am to see her, though, I hate being made to cry with the sight of an uncontrollably devastated Judy Greer five minutes into a picture.) Every hero deserves a best friend, and here it's Peter McVries (David Jonsson), a Southerner with a shaky accent – Jonsson himself is British – and a heart as big as the sky. We also get a number of expected war-drama figures: the psycho (Charlie Plummer), the cutup (Ben Wang), the loner (Garrett Wareing), the bookworm (Jordan Gonzalez); the obviously-first-to-die (Roman Griffin Davis … sorry, Jojo Rabbit fans). As the first mile of their trek leads to dozens leads to 100 leads to several hundred, the guys banter and bicker and bond and occasionally relieve themselves in the street, and as an audience, it dawns you – as it belatedly dawns on the participants – that no possible ending will be a happy one. Instead, the question becomes: Just how miserable is this thing gonna get?
Without indulging in spoilers, the answer is “plenty,” but Lawrence, Mollner, and the cast – which includes Mark Hamill in his second 2025 King adaptation after The Life of Chuck, and demonstrating his fearsome vocal malleability as that hateful Major – manage to keep you both invested and entertained almost throughout. For perhaps understandable reason, there isn't a lot of visual variety in the film. Yet Lawrence ably atones for that deficiency with excellent long takes of his actors whose descent into physical and emotional turmoil feels painstakingly true rather than scripted. I didn't notch a single bum performance in the bunch – Karate Kid: Legends star Wang is particularly good in both his dramatic and wisecracking duties – and while there's no romance on display, the deep affection that develops between Hoffman's Raymond and Jonsson's Peter is something to behold. There haven't been many competitors for the title, but I'd go so far as to call theirs the cinematic love story of the year to date, the performers' relaxed, mutual adoration like a more ravaged, more heartbreaking rendition of the adolescent Wil Wheaton/River Phoenix scenes in Stand by Me. The partnership between Hoffman and Jonsson is the principal reason that The Long Walk gets harder to watch as it progresses, knowing as you do that their characters can't possibly cross the finish line together.
But is Lawrence's latest perhaps too fatalistic, to the point that you're left wondering why you watched it in the first place? I'd love to say no – that movies should be allowed to get as dark as their makers want. And a massively depressing ending (and one that significantly diverged from the author's story, to boot) was delivered in Frank Darabont's 2007 take on King's The Mist, a decision that, I would argue, worked to the film's benefit. Yet there's so much contrivance in The Long Walk, particularly in its gradually revealed information about the Major, that the movie should hardly be expected to be a model of gut-wrenching realism, and I think it was a mistake for Lawrence, Mollner, and maybe King (I haven't read the book) to not give us any outside perspectives on the walk. We keep hearing about how it's must-see TV for the nation. Not once, however, do we witness anyone actually viewing the event from home, and the scattered onlookers as the boys march past resemble grim-faced, purposefully personality-free Dorothea Lange subjects; there's no hint about what they're thinking or feeling. For all of its outdoor vistas, The Long Walk turns into a weirdly claustrophobic experience in which the only expansiveness comes via the enormity of the walkers' suffering, and that, in the end, made both me and the film I was watching feel awfully, unnecessarily small.
