Comedy just doesn't get any better than this

Rating: 10/10 (20 August 2014)

It's probably easiest just cutting to the chase with this one and to lay my cards out on the table and state that I consider This is Spinal Tap to possibly be the best comedy film ever made. With this movie, director Rob Reiner along with fellow writer/actors Michael McKean, Harry Shearer and Christopher Guest devised a type of comedy that it took decades for everybody else to catch up with. The trick was that they delivered very funny material in a manner that always held on to reality. There is never any over comic acting or nudging to camera, the humour is consistently grounded in reality and that is core quality of the film. Many of the very best subsequent TV comedies have taken this approach religiously, such as 'I Am Alan Partridge', 'The Office', 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' – amongst many others. The influence of Spinal Tap is immeasurable in this sense. Back in the early 80's this comedy style was pretty uncommon and hence many thought that this mockumentary was in fact a documentary.
The performances are crucial with the three leads being particularly brilliant and all side characters being quite excellent as well. A lot of the dialogue was improvised and this explains the naturalistic flow of things – you can easily re-watch this and discover brilliant lines buried in overlapping dialogue for example. This is one of those films that really doesn't feel like it should be reviewed in the traditional sense because there are simply far too many moments of comedy genius that recounting them all would take forever. It's quite simply a movie that just needs to be seen. It never gets old in any way and remains as funny now as it ever was.