Bill & Ted Face the Music review: A sweet gesture for the franchise

Bill & Ted’s excellent adventure en Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey hardly have a plot held them together. What could a third movie in the franchise, delivered three decades after the previous episode, really bring to the table?

Creates a keen awareness of the passing of time Bill & Ted Face of Music just compelling enough to justify its existence.

The first Bill & Ted film came out in 1989, starring Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves as two high school lunkheads who travel through time to put together a history class presentation. The sequel followed two years later. The upcoming third film in the series, Bill & Ted Face of Music, directed by Dean Parisot (Galaxy Quest), again sends Bill and Ted hurling through time and space, but this time the heart of the adventure is not so faint. The two best friends must save the world, sure, but more importantly, they are trying to save their families.

Now well into middle age, Bill and Ted (again played by Winter and Reeves) have fallen from grace. Their rock band Wild Stallyns has become a joke – their last concert is at a family wedding. Their experimental stylings, including a poem entitled “That which binds us through time: the chemical, physical and biological nature of love and the exploration of the meaning of meaning, part 1,” are nonsense by those.

Moreover, their relationships with their wives, Joanna (Jayma Mays) and Elizabeth (Erinn Hayes), begin to struggle, as the two men are apparently unable to do anything independent of each other. Meanwhile, Ted’s daughter Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and Bill’s daughter Thea (Samara Weaving) are carbon copies of their fathers.

Photo: United artists released

The certainty that Bill and Ted’s shit can carry on to the people around them after a while is one of the more interesting ideas that are original Bill & Ted screenwriters Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon star in. The two men are in love, but they are also terribly dim, speaking in unison or offending each other’s senses, all with a “Whoa, dude” surfer-bro attitude that has not changed a leak in almost 30 years. Only the discovery that their wives will leave them in a future timeline seems to actually come through. (Even the therapy of couples goes wrong, because Bill and Ted consider it yet another activity that the two should do together.) Although they tell at the beginning of the film that they have 78 minutes to sing a song writing that will save the universe from temporary collapse, the quest to save their families from falling apart is what really puts a fire under their ass.

Winter and Reeves somehow fail to appear to be making impressions of their old selves, because today Bill and Ted encounter older, more colorful versions of themselves as they travel through time. Future caricatures give them a solution to the typically big Bill and Ted flaws (even rarer accents and bizarre costumes), and let them keep the main performances relatively soft and serious by comparison, and tap into the bittersweetness caused by the film runs from its start. The film opens with clips from the first two films, and it is striking how young the two leading men then looked back. There can be no denying the passing of time.

Photo: United artists released

That’s theoretically where Billie and Thea come in, because the film is also a transition from the franchise torch to the younger generation. But the story does not give Lundy-Paine and Weaving much to do. Billie and Thea essentially relive the events of the first Bill & Ted, except with more of a musical fandom, and they unfortunately do not have much personality outside of their “Hey, dude!” influence. Their performances also underscore how remarkable it is that Winter and Reeves are still fun to watch after all this time, instead of grating. Lundy-Paine manages to disappear in her Ted impression, but Weaving (beautiful in Ready or not) never completely manages the performance. The way Bill and Ted talk and act has become so iconic that they imitate and make it feel natural is a high bar to clear, especially since their ways of getting started were so over-the-top.

Like its predecessors, Bill & Ted Face of Music is ultimately just friendly fluff, but Winter and Reeves are charming together, and the need for Bill and Ted to grow up a little helps give the film a backbone. It’s a light film, but a sweet way to revisit the franchise, and easy enough to follow for audiences unfamiliar with the first two films. (Although some of the appeal may be lost on them.) More importantly, it seems like a distraction for Winter and Reeves. Bill and Ted are still the Wild Stallins, but they have grown older from wild horses, and Bill & Ted Face of Music is at its best when it concentrates on what happens when they finally figure it out.

Bill & Ted Face of Music is now available in theaters, and for rent Amazon, Vudu and other streaming services.