With a new Spinal Tap reunion hitting theaters, it’s time to once again re-examine the legendary output and failed comeback of an enduring but frustrating artist. No, not Spinal Tap itself, a fictional metal band that has always been characterized as endearingly mediocre, with a dash of mischievous songcraft injected by its comic architects. And not co-star and co-writer Christopher Guest, who took the mockumentary style of This Is Spinal Tap and later ran (or, sometimes, briskly walked) with it on projects like Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind. No, I’m talking about the director who doesn’t pop up in those subsequent mockumentaries, but followed This Is Spinal Tap with a series of stone cold classics: Rob Reiner.

Circa the early-2000s release of Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, it might have seemed absurd to posit that Reiner was the secret sauce that made This Is Spinal Tap a comedy classic, while Guest’s subsequent movies tended more toward the warmly amusing (and, honestly, diminishing returns as they went on). A Mighty Wind may only be intermittently hilarious, but the year it came out, Reiner had a forgotten Luke Wilson/Kate Hudson rom-com called Alex & Emma. For Your Consideration may be one of Guest’s weaker films, but it came out in between Reiner making the ill-advised Graduate companion piece Rumor Has It… and the hit schmaltzfest The Bucket List. Guest may not have maintained his fastball, but Reiner stood knee-deep in studio shlock.

It was a vexing turn in part because Reiner spent about a decade seeming to master the art of the studio movie. The Sure Thing, his John Cusack-starring follow-up to This Is Spinal Tap, isn’t his most distinguished film, but it’s instructive that his de facto teen/campus/spring break comedy essentially remakes It Happened One Night – not because Reiner was the new Frank Capra but because he seemed to possess the instincts of a well-practiced studio-system workhorse. Like Michael Curtiz or Robert Wise, Reiner hopped between genres and made several offhand masterpieces where his direction synthesized note-perfect performances and memorable writing, real the-system-works type of stuff.

Observe: He followed The Sure Thing (a solid-as-hell teen rom-com, to be clear) with Stand By Me, a funny and clear-eyed adaptation of a non-horror novella from Stephen King. Then he made The Princess Bride, which may be the most beloved American family-friendly fantasy of all time, which he in turn followed with When Harry Met Sally…, a template-setting romantic comedy so powerful that people today still watch a Billy Crystal movie. Then he pivoted to horror/thriller, adapting more Stephen King with Misery; following that movie’s surprise Best Actress Oscar win for Kathy Bates, he made a more traditional awards play via A Few Good Men. At the time, it was considered something of an Oscar washout – four nominations, nothing for Reiner’s direction – but was a popular hit and remains an endlessly rewatchable cable-era staple. Before David Fincher tamed an Aaron Sorkin script into crisp entertainment, there was Reiner, doing the job with little fuss. If there’s a throughline in Reiner’s genre-hopping work, it’s characters with self-aware narratives about themselves and each other: the musicians self-conscious of their images and legacy in Spinal Tap; the explicitly meta storytelling of The Princes Bride; the rumors and suburban tall tales of Stand By Me, recalled by a writer; another writer, subjected to his biggest/worst fan in Misery; the couples telling their courtship stories in When Harry Met Sally…; even the courtroom theatrics of A Few Good Men are about constructing a clear narrative for the jury.

Those stories still go over today. How many other still-living directors have made half a dozen such widely seen and beloved mainstream classics in a ten-year period? (Less! Eight years elapsed between Spinal Tap and A Few Good Men.) Yes, there are great filmmakers with more powerful or lengthier streaks; your Scorseses, your Coens, your Wes and Paul Thomas Andersons. But during a compressed period, Reiner made a bunch of movies virtually everyone has seen. Take even standard-setting blockbuster artist Steven Spielberg during the same 1984-1992 span: He made The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, two Indiana Jones movies, Always, and Hook. Some terrific stuff in there – as well as two of his weakest movies. It sounds insane in retrospect, but for that specific time, Reiner has him beat.

Of course, Spielberg is an unusual combination of popular artist and idiosyncratically talented auteur. Perhaps the more useful comparison is Reiner’s fellow sitcom-star-turned-director Ron Howard, who between 1984 and 1992 made his own broad comedy (Gung Ho), star-driven rom-com (Splash), affecting comedy-drama (Parenthood), family-friendly fantasy (Willow), thriller (Backdraft), and Tom Cruise vehicle (Far and Away, just a six months before A Few Good Men), along with Cocoon. Among those, only Parenthood really stands with Reiner’s work.

Ah, but in 1994, Howard made The Paper, followed the next year by Apollo 13, representing his best sustained impression of Howard Hawks. Reiner, on the other hand, had North and The American President. The latter isn’t bad, with another Sorkin script that amounts to a West Wing dry run. Not as good as any of Reiner’s first seven movies, but a charmer. North, though, is a family-comedy disaster, perhaps most notable for inspiring the title of the Roger Ebert collection I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie. American President seemed like Reiner bouncing back. But the very next year, he returned with the fill-fated Oscar hopeful Ghosts of Mississippi, about the trial of the man who murdered civil rights hero Medgar Evers. The film did garner nominations for James Woods (in what turned out to be the unfortunate role of a literal lifetime as a white supremacist) and makeup. I’m not sure if a single person has watched since 1996 or maybe early 1997 – and not that many people watched it then, either.

Ghosts, perhaps even more than North, feels in retrospect like the real Reiner career spiral. A bum comedy, after all, can happen to almost anyone. But after making perhaps the apex of filtering Black history through a white protagonist (a lawyer played by Alec Baldwin), something felt off in Reiner’s subsequent work, even as he continued to dabble in different degrees of comedy, drama, romance, and history. Every time he seemed poised to make a classic old-fashioned studio movie – like The Story of Us, a marriage dramedy with Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer – it would come out like off-key caterwauling.

I don’t intend to run down the past 30 years’ worth of Reiner misses, one by one. I can’t, actually, because I haven’t seen them all – several Michael Douglas and/or Morgan Freeman heartwarmers passed me by entirely. Maybe they’re buried gems? But every time I’d check in with a Reiner picture, hopeful that he might recapture some of that old-fashioned, crowd-pleasing studio craft, I’d see something as cornball or cutesy as the kid-nostalgia romance Flipped, the last movie with a Reiner screenplay credit before the new Spinal Tap sequel. Howard, whatever his limitations as a filmmaker, has consistently, even stubbornly, stayed in the movies-for-adults lane for most of his career. His recent Eden is full of sex, violence, historical details, and movie stars. Reiner seems to have retreated to the sitcoms of his youth, only without making anything as galvanizing as All in the Family. It’s almost like he’s swapped with Howard’s old job, skewing more Happy Days.

By later-Reiner standards, Spinal Tap II isn’t half bad. By the standards of the first movie, it’s well over half bad; there are certainly some funny jokes, but the whole thing feels both aimless and toothless by the end. Reiner seems to be having a good time in corny-uncle mode, which doesn’t quite work when sequelizing one of the great deadpan spoofs of all time. To some extent, this tracks with Reiner’s studio-guy career. Quentin Tarantino has spent much of the past decade thinking about how many good-to-great directors fall off as they get older, something he seems to have absorbed primarily by examples from older filmmakers faltering into the 1970s and 1980s; someone like Robert Wise made some interesting late-career stuff (I’ll go to bat for that first Star Trek movie) but he wasn’t doing The Haunting and The Sound of Music back-to-back anymore.

Is Reiner hurting anyone by failing to keep the faith for an imitation of an old system, at a time when even that imitation has mostly fallen by the wayside? Of course not. He seems like a nice guy. But part of the discomfort in Spinal Tap II is its lack of self-reflection; not only does it fail to equal the original (an admittedly near-impossible task), it fails to engage with why it might not equal the original, and, as such, with what’s funny about familiar band reunion stories. It’s not really supposed to be funny; it’s just an excuse to get the guys back together again. Reiner’s later work still sometimes seems preoccupied with narratives, whether it’s about perspectives on a marriage, childhood nostalgia, or a writer on a deadline. What he really seems to have lost, though, is the ability to tell the difference between characters constructing their own narratives, and directors clumsily pulling the strings.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.