REVIEW: ‘Bill & Ted Face the Music’ is an optimistic riff in a gloomy time
Samara Weaving, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in Bill & Ted Face the Music.
I’ve done way too much doom-scrolling lately. I’m a little bit hooked on opening up Twitter, even if I already know the news of the day, the local COVID-19 numbers, etc, only to find more apparent examples of the world sliding into the abyss.
The best antidote to this is something I didn’t know I wanted: a new Bill & Ted movie. Unlike so many franchises out there, there didn’t seem to be a hardcore fan base clamouring for Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves to reprise their cult classic slacker characters. And yet here we are, 29 years after the previous film, catching up with our most excellent time travellers.
Hearing about Alex Winter’s efforts over the years to get this project off the ground, I had rather uncharitably lumped it in with Dan Ackroyd’s zombified attempt to get a Ghostbusters 3 into production, or any of the other recent attempts to cash in on 70s, 80s, and 90s nostalgia. But to write off the new Bill & Ted on this basis elides the nature of the original movies: scruffy, jovial adventures made on a shoestring, featuring some of the most relentlessly optimistic characters in pop culture. Nothing can get these guys down for long - not getting lost in time, not being banished to hell, not being replaced with robot doubles - and that’s the exact kind of levity we need in our entertainment these days.
So there’s something infectiously uplifting about two 50-something guys doggedly sticking to their destiny of uniting the world through music, still addressing each other as “dude”, still celebrating good news with air-guitar riffs. Admittedly, Face the Music is a greatest-hits style experience, combining and remixing many of the basic elements of the two previous movies. But the improbable result is that the screenplay’s overall positivity keeps the movie from feeling like the work of cynical profiteers.
William Sadler returns as Death.
We reconnect with Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Winter) and Theodore “Ted” Logan (Reeves) at a family wedding. In keeping with the real-life collapse in popularity of hair metal in the 90s, the amazing success of their band the Wyld Stallyns, as seen at the end of 1991’s Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, has also evaporated. They’re stuck in a rut, unable to write the prophesied song that will unite the world. Ted is even considering selling his Les Paul.
Meanwhile, Bill and Ted’s wives, princesses they quasi-kidnapped from medieval England in the first movie, are the family providers, and have insisted that they attend marriage counselling. Faced with family strife and career failure, Bill and Ted are once again visited by an emissary from the future (Kristen Schaal), and are told they have until that evening to finish a song that will stop reality from tearing itself apart.
Of course, never the studious or straightforward types, Bill and Ted decide to take their classic phone booth time machine into the future to try to steal the song from their future selves. At the same time, their daughters Thea (Samara Weaving) and Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who have grown up into mini copies of their dads, borrow a decidedly Apple-style upgrade to the time machine to venture into the time stream, collecting famous musicians like Jimi Hendrix, Louis Armstrong, and Mozart to help bring their fathers’ song to life.
Like either of the two previous movies, the more you think about the details of the time travel, the less sense it makes. This is, after all, the series where characters randomly exclaim “Station!” as a catchphrase, an incredibly dense in-joke from a deleted chunk of the second movie’s screenplay. Somehow, the movie doesn’t need a trim, rules-bound universe - it gets by on sight gags and performances alone. By the time the climax hits, Bill and Ted have gone full Doctor Who, splitting themselves into infinite versions of themselves to distribute musical instruments around the world, and Ted refers to himself as “an eternal being”. The complexity of the plot and the laissez-faire attitude of the characters basically cancel each other out, leaving a contented smile on your face in spite of it all.
Bill and Ted once again cross paths with future versions of themselves.
Some components are more convincing than others. There are some hints at yet another suddenly-deleted subplot with the princesses, who go on their own time travels with elderly versions of themselves, but which barely factors into the final story. It’s also fun to watch Weaving and Lundy-Paine’s impressions of Winter and Reeves, even if their temporal journey is merely a compressed retelling of the first movie, skipping the fish-out-of-water gags like Excellent Adventure’s Napoleon Bonaparte diving into a ice cream sundae at a shopping mall.
The Bill & Ted movies have never been technical masterpieces, though somehow the jump to digital filmmaking in Face the Music hasn’t helped anything. Many sequences have the cheap chroma-key look of direct-to-streaming schlock, with characters composited into less-than-engaging 3D backdrops. Even so, at only 91 minutes, the movie runs at a speedy clip and packs in enough jokes that you don’t really have the time or inclination to nitpick.
Will there be a fourth installment? I sincerely hope not. The mediated success of this edition already feels like an unexpected windfall. If this movie relies mostly on callbacks to its predecessors, it’s unclear if even a spin-off featuring Weaving and Lundy-Paine - or their characters’ mothers - more prominently would distinguish itself enough to be worthwhile. Perhaps all Bill & Ted needed was this coda to prove that not all nostalgia trips need to exploit existing intellectual property. With the right blend of earnestness and heart, classic characters can come back from the afterlife - though maybe only after beating Death on game night.
Bill & Ted Face the Music gets three stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
Loved to see William Sadler’s Death return - and the movie doesn’t overuse him, either.
I was surprised by how funny the insecure killer robot Dennis Caleb McCoy (Anthony Carrigan) turned out to be.
The denizens of the future have moved out of their Day-Glo foam fashion trend, it seems.