Mark Reviews Movies: BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 27, 2020

When we last saw Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves), the airheaded musicians and destined saviors of humanity, everything seemed to have worked out for the best. After learning of their fate to unite humankind under a single song of their writing and going on an excellent adventure through the time, the guys had to take a bogus journey through the underworld, in order to defeat a heinous villain who didn't want the utopian society Bill and Ted's song would eventually create. The two's music career and future success, leading to that ultimate song of unity, appeared to be set in stone.

Some 25 years later, the guys are back in Bill & Ted Face the Music, and well, things didn't go exactly to plan. The two are still musicians, for sure, but they haven't written their history-changing song. Indeed, they're not even famous anymore. The songs, like the duo's band Wyld Stallyns, have faded from memory, and at the start of this long-gestating sequel, we learn that the entire fabric of space and time is in peril because of Bill and Ted's failure.

Failure is at the center of the premise of this new installment, which begins with some happy nostalgia and, rather inventively, forces these two characters to confront the fact that they're trapped in an ambition that might exceed their abilities. We like Bill and Ted. They're funny—without knowing why almost all of the time—and just clever enough—despite their obvious lack of traditional smarts—and mostly harmless—especially compared to the protagonists of some of the more mean-spirited movies that came out around the time of their first introduction.

We don't want them to fail, but let's face the truth of the matter here: It never seemed like the best idea to put the entire future happiness and success of the human race on a pair of metalheads from San Dimas, California. This sequel, once again written by the team of Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon (who also wrote the previous films), actually addresses that simmering suspicion.

As nice as it may be to be reunited with these likeable goofs, it's more surprising that the filmmakers seem to have come up with a good enough narrative and even better thematic reason to return to these characters. Played by Winter and Reeves with enough gusto that it's as if only three years—not almost 30—have passed since the last installment, Bill and Ted have to confront the idea that they are, always have been, and always will be failures.

Their adventure this time involves time travel, obviously. With historical figures and places changing positions along the space-time continuum, Kelly (Kristen Schaal), the daughter of Bill and Ted's previous guide Rufus (George Carlin has a brief cameo as a hologram), comes from the future for a talking-to and a warning. The Great Leader (Holland Taylor) of future society tells the pair that have less than 80 minutes (giving the story a real-time race-against-the-clock gimmick) to write and perform the song that will unite humanity. If they don't, reality as we know it will collapse.

As for Bill and Ted's bright idea, it's to visit themselves in the future, at a time after they've written the song and, basically, steal the tune from their future selves. "Of all the counterintuitive ideas" his best pal has ever had, Bill cheers Ted's scheme, "this is the counterintuitive-est."

Meanwhile, there's some more time-traveling happening. The duo's wives Joanna (Jayma Mays) and Elizabeth (Erinn Hayes) are starting to worry about their husbands' co-dependent relationship—to each other, not so much to the wives. Their own future selves take the women on a journey to find out if the marriages could work. Also meanwhile, hoping to help their fathers, Bill and Ted's daughter's Thea (Samara Weaving) and Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine)—and, yes, each guy named his child after his best friend—travel through time to put together a most righteous band of the best musicians in history.

The most innovative conceit is the simple one: watching Bill and Ted see their lives fall apart in more and more disastrous ways, as they chase a dream they apparently can never hope to accomplish. There's something different, both in terms of the story and the perspective on these characters, in this central premise that adds a melancholy, almost tragic level to the comedy here, as the future Bills and Teds try to hide and/or deny just how miserable their lives have become.

The movie eventually loses interest in this (A final visit to the future just resolves it with an entire act of story remaining). The material with the daughters, a familiar trek through time to find historical figures, starts the process of the filmmakers finding the easy path with more familiar plot elements—a killer robot from the future and another trip to Hell, where Death (William Sadler) holds a grudge.

Nostalgia is so appealing because of the comfort brings, and for a while, Bill & Ted Face the Music does bring comfort, in being re-introduced to old pals, and smartly upsets that comfort, in supposing that these guys aren't what they thought they were or would be. The movie itself, though, ultimately becomes too comfortable in nostalgic ideas at the cost of some tougher, more honest ones.

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