Review: ‘Bill & Ted Face the Music’ is medium nostalgia

The Los Angeles Times is committed to watching new theatrical film versions during theCovid-19 pandemic. Because film association has inherent risks at this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines when sketched by the CDC and local health officials. We will continue to note the various ways readers can watch each new movie, including drive-in theaters in the Southland and VOD / streaming options as available.

It’s been 30 years since Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves captivated audiences like the goofy, time-traveling metalheads Bill S. Preston, Esq., And Ted “Theodore” Logan in “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. In the third episode, “Bill & Ted Face the Music”, Reeves and Winter look at their typical burnout characters in a movie that offers an easy dose of nostalgia.

In “Excellent Adventure”, Bill and Ted had to pass history class to avoid military school, which they did by collecting historical figures with a time-traveling telephone stand. In “Bogus Journey”, Bill and Ted escape from hell to win the Battle of the Bands as the Wild Stallins. Many, many years later, they still pursue those rock ‘n’ roll dreams. In “Face the Music”, written by original writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, and directed by Dean Parisot (“Galaxy Quest”), Bill and Ted face their midlife crisis.

The co-dependent brothers have not grown much over the years, which has hindered their lives with their wives, medieval princesses Joanna (Jayma Mays) and Elizabeth (Erinn Hayes), revealed in a disastrous couple therapy session. They are the proud fathers of music-obsessed Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and Thea (Samara Weaving), but they are far more guy than dad. But soon time travel calls for, in the form of Kelly (Kristen Schaal), the daughter of her former futuristic leader Rufus (George Carlin), who instructs her to perform a song that will unite reality and prevent the timeline from collapsing into itself. , With only a few hours left, Bill and Ted use their time-traveling skills to extract the song from their future selves, and their journey through time will help them learn to reconcile their own realities with their families.

“Face the Music” has almost all the gravitas one would expect from a “Bill & Ted” movie, that is to say, almost none. It’s nice to see Winter (now a prolific director) and Reeves (now John Wick) return in these roles, though the cognitive dissonance between sweet doofus Ted and the Reeves we know as a serious, laconic action star is a long jump.

Weaving and Lundy-Paine prove to be the breakouts of “Face the Music”, and nail the ways of their fathers. Her piece of the story, traveling through time to pick up the best musicians to back the Wild Stallyns, could (or should) be the whole movie. Another notable is Anthony Carrigan (who plays NoHo Hank on HBO’s ‘Barry’) as a deadly, yet neurotic robot, who chases Bill and Ted through time as they track down their various future selves in search of their reality. -unifying song. His white cue ball head is a nod to William Sadler’s incredible turn as Death in “Bogus Journey,” and Sadler reprises the role here, as does franchise veteran Hal Landon Jr. as Chief Logan and Amy Stoch as foster stepmother Missy.

While one should not expect realism, what sounds wrong is the casting of Hayes and Mays as women of the duo. They are more than a decade younger than Reeves and Winter, like the two different sets of actresses who played the princesses in previous films, and the age difference makes it feel like a particularly bad brand of Hollywood time travel.

As Bill and Ted jump through time, the narratives of these films are just loose assortments of boiling bits and cameos, and “Face the Music” does not disappear from there. While not quite together, in this casual kickback with a few old friends, it’s the dudes who remain excellent.

Katie Walsh is a film critic for Tribune News Service.