“Bill & Ted Face the Music” has a lot of fluff. It’s about how Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves), those metal-headed knuckles who talk like Jeff Spicoli with a thesaurus, just have 77 minutes to travel through time and sing the song get – of themselves! Because they already wrote it! Whoa !! – that will unite humanity and save reality as we know it. As they trip further and further into the future, they encounter older versions of themselves, a variation on the doubling-up-of-identity-through-space-time stunt with which the first two “Bill and Ted” films played, only here it gets an important metaphysical stone training. Meanwhile, the daughters of Bill and Ted, Thea (Samara Weaving) and Billie (Brigitte Lundy-Paine), who are obviously chips from the old blockhead, are leaving back in time to gather a band of musicians that includes Louis Armstrong, Jimi Hendrix, Mozart and Kid Cudi.
That sounds like a gloss on the historical-legendary plotline of “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” and it is, but “Bill & Ted’s Face the Music” exploits it with an antique video shell game logic that plays with rationality and melt it down at the same time. It also melts your resistance. The film is weightless and super-goofy – a blissful balloon of nostalgia. It’s straightforward, it’s making you smile and short, it’s a surprisingly sweet love story (about Bill and Ted trying to live their marriage – although the real love story is obviously the one that takes place between the two of them), and it is a better tribute to the one-world utopian power of classical rock than ‘Yesterday’ was. On a scale of one to 10, I would not say that “Face the Music” goes to 11, but it is a very excellent sequel.
In the late ’80s, when they made their debut, Bill and Ted were a fabulous anomaly – a few space cadet Valley Boys in a world of Valley Girls, though it does not deny that Sean’s performance Penn as the lucky surfer Jeff Spicoli got there first. Yet 30 years later, Bill and Ted now look like the big marshals of a holy clan of suburban idiot criminal buddy teams they more or less started: Wayne and Garth, Beavis and Butt-head, Jay and Silent Bob. What unites all of these characters, apart from the fact that they hard rock ‘n’ roll and soften their brains, is that they experience every moment of their lives as if they were watching it on television. The reality is not really for them – it’s a show they live in – and “The Wonderful Adventure of Bill & Ted” was a loud celebration of the joy of being young, hooked on air guitar, and totally flashy.
How can the “No way!” ways do these two look now that they have reached middle age? Surprisingly good. Bill and Ted are devoted men – to Joanna (Jayma Mays) and Elizabeth (Erinn Hayes), the medieval princesses they met in the first film – although a funny scene in couple therapy shows that their symbiotic devotion to each other, in that life-is-a-garage-band way, she has been arrested as infectiously as ever.
But here’s an irony for you. In the years since “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and his infamous 1991 sequel, “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey,” Alex Winter made a slow fade from full-time acting and became a striking, omnivorous documentary filmmaker (his films include Downloads , “” The Panama Papers, “and the upcoming” Zappa “), while Keanu Reeves remained a star on screen with a touch of” Whoa! factor. Yet it is in “Face the Music” Winter, radiant and spectacle-eyed, that still fully embodies the cocoa-innocent ge-whiz man-child spirit of the thing. While Reeves does a fine job with it resurrecting Ted, but when he does not speak and you see in his face, paralyzed by that long hair of the 70s, you see his gravitas slip through it.
“Bill & Ted Face the Music”, written by the team of Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon (who wrote the first two films), with Dean Parisot as director and Steven Soderbergh executive producing, has a countdown plot that includes the real time unfolds, like the movie-noir story of “DOA” It has set scenes in a blazing mountainous hell that resembles something out of a “Thor” sequel. It has a killer robot named Dennis (Anthony Carrigan), who under his ominously white-plated armor appears to be as sensitive and accommodating as Stuart Smalley crossed with the Cowardly Lion. It has a triumphant rendition of William Sadler as the Grim Reaper (he was the highlight of “Bogus Journey”), pictured here as an imperial Euro-snob bass guitarist of hilarious vanities.
And it has Reeves and Winter a field day playing the older performances of Bill and Ted. Whether they’re faux-Spinal Tap abandoned rockers crouching in Dave Grohl’s house, pumping hardened prisoners, or old men waiting for each other to kick their ass in adjoining hospital beds, these two find new new layers play in their early English devil-horn community. (It’s worth the effort to sit through the end of the closing credits to watch one of their highlight scenes.)
The film also features pleasing performances from Brigitte Lundy-Paine and Samara Weaving as Billie and Thea, the daughters who each inherited a bit of their fathers’ spirits, although it’s clear they’re about three times as smart. Their correlation of immortal musicians from history begins at a climax, especially when Mozart is jammed with Hendrix (Dazmann Still) and Louis Armstrong (Jeremiah Craft). But the musical legends do not appear with the same gusto that Lincoln, Joan of Arc, and “So-crates” did in “Excellent Adventure.” What works, with divine bliss, is Bill and Ted finding themselves – literally and spiritually – through time travel. My favorite moment in the film is Keanu’s delivery of the line, ‘If you ask me, I’m essentially an infinite me. See you later! ”The thing is, if he says it, you will know it exactly what it means. That’s fine.
