"Bill & Ted Face the Music"

When I was a kid, Bill & Ted was one of those things that I was aware of without having ever seen. All I really knew was that "Bill & Ted" was a comedy film about two guys who travelled through time in a phone booth, like Doctor Who (and when I was a kid I didn't know much about Doctor Who either). I also knew that they said "excellent" a lot, which resulted in them kind of morphing into a blob in my mind with Wayne and Garth from Wayne's World (which I've still never properly watched). In my Twenties, I watched Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey at a movie night, but not having seen the first one I wasn't really into it. Since then, my biggest exposure to Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure was because I'm interested in the history of the Napoleonic Wars; clips of Napoleon from Excellent Adventure get used as GIFs a lot when people are making jokes about that era online. That was pretty much it. So a few months ago, when I friend of mine said "Check out the trailer for the new Bill & Ted film!" I was like "Uh... okay."

The trailer seemed amusing enough, so when it came time that Bill & Ted Face the Music was actually going to be released in theatres (pandemics notwithstanding), I thought "I'd better actually watch Excellent Adventure, and rewatch Bogus Journey." So I did. And those two films, as I expected/remembered, were amusing, light pieces of comedy which benefit from a spirit of fun; things happen in these films because they're funny, without much effort being needed for explanation. Thus Billy the Kid can become friends with Socrates, who can only speak Classical Greek (so no one can understand what he's saying, and he can't understand them) and Napoleon, accidentally displaced from 1805 to 1989, is perfectly happy to eat ice cream, go tenpin bowling, and hog the slides at a water park.

In many respects, I actually found Bogus Journey to be a good deal better than Excellent Adventure, not only because it's more visually interesting and creatively shot and directed, probably due to a higher budget, but also because of William Sadler's amusing turn as Death, which works very well with the cheerful, likeable performances of the young Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, back when both of their careers were quite different. Based on the trailers, I figured that Face the Music was probably going to be more or less a trip down memory lane of the comedy concepts of the original film, just with the addition of Bill and Ted being middle aged and having daughters. I wasn't really expecting anything new.

And, for better or worse, that's what Face the Music is. The plot is essentially the same as both of the originals, except instead of having to pass their history assignment or play in the Battle of the Bands, Bill and Ted have to compose and perform "the song to unite the world". They travel through time and the afterlife in pursuit of this goal. They're hunted at one point by a killer robot sent from the future. Meanwhile, their daughters, Thea and Billie, have a mini Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey of their own, assembling historical musicians and inadvertently making a detour to hell. In the end they reunite (including with Death) and play the song at just the right moment. And all, as expected, is well.

Bill & Ted isn't the kind of film series that you criticise from a story or character standpoint: Bill and Ted are silly and so are their adventures. Really, the issues with Face the Music come largely from a production perspective, although I will say that, writing wise, it would have been nice if writers Solomon and Matheson (creators and original performers of the characters) could have done something new. Production-wise, though, I thought the film was visually a bit cold, not only in the way it's shot but also in terms of effects. There's something too clean about modern lenses and digital recording that especially makes flat wide shots look like something from marketing material rather than cinema. Similarly, the use of modern CGI tends to be quite sterile and lacking in grit; I would have rather have seen more of Bill and Ted's own homes and environments different to the polished CGI-enhanced future and hell locations.

That aside, Bill & Ted Face the Music is fine. It's reasonably funny, quite funny in parts, and the premise of the two leads trying to hunt down the future song from various older versions of themselves is entertaining. I actually wish that this had been used to a greater extent; perhaps the best, most Bill-&-Ted-esque moment in the film is when the two, desperate to ensure that their hostile future selves won't know what they're up to, put buckets on their heads and fall out a window in order to deliberately give their future selves unclear memories of the past. Most of the best moments come from these interactions with various future selves and how they try to trick each other, and I think more of this wouldn't have gone astray. As a number of people have stated, Alex Winter seems more familiar as Bill than Reeves, with his latter-day John Wick-esque action man persona, not seeming as comfortable as Ted; he just feels a little bit too sad, although he gets some funny moments arguing with his future self.

The other major aspect of the film involves the daughters, Thea and Billie, and while this is enjoyable in itself, in many respects the two characters are more sweet and likeable than they are laugh-out-loud funny, and I think it's a shame they weren't afforded more moments to be outright humorous. Every Bill & Ted film now has its cutaway story, the role occupied by Napoleon's hijinks in the first film and by Evil Robot Bill and Ted in the second, so it feels appropriate to do something similar here, and using the time machine for actual musical purposes makes sense, although with Mozart showing up in this one after Bach in Bogus Journey and Beethoven in Excellent Adventure I think they've run the full gamut of well-known Early Modern German musicians. It's nice that Bill and Ted discover that their daughters can lead the composition of the "song to unite the world", and the film benefits from a heartwarming and positive ending. And that's not hugely different from the originals, so, again, it's appropriate, although as I say it's more "nice" than particularly funny. Probably my only complaint is that I wish there had been a little more William Sadler as Death. It was nice for Ted's dad to show up once again.

I don't know how I've managed to write over one thousand words on Bill & Ted Face the Music, but there you go. It's a silly, sometimes funny, sometimes just "nice" film with some strong performances and some iffy visual qualities. That's about all it needed to be. Was it everything a third Bill & Ted film could have been? I don't even know if that's a meaningful question. I think it lived up to the existing standard of the original films. Surely for a sequel made nearly thirty years later that more or less constitutes success. We wouldn't necessarily suffer from more films which showed the potential for people to like each other and get along. Who knows? Maybe this will turn out to be timely and after everything people have gone through lately they might start seeing things more like the Prestons and Logans. Maybe we really have seen a little glimpse of the future. Maybe.