Bill & Ted Face the Music: Sci-Fi Comedy Reboot Dumb But Well-Meaning

By Kim Hughes

Rating: C+

Will it come as a surprise to learn that Bill & Ted Face the Music is spectacularly dumb? So dumb, in fact, that trying to unpack its plot is akin to finagling a Rubik’s cube while riding a unicycle and smoking a joint.

If time-travel movies are inherently confounding — as my esteemed colleague Jim Slotek posited about Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, the other new time travel–themed film now playing — then Bill & Ted upholds the tradition with aplomb.

But it also shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone approaching the decades-later sequel to 1991’s Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (itself an also-ran to the surprise success of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure from 1989) that Bill & Ted Face the Music has a ton of heart and is, for all its noggin-scratching incoherence, pretty much impossible to hate. Taunt yes but not with anything like vitriol.

At its root is a story of filial love… and the quest for a song that will “unite the world and save reality, dude.” The titular characters, played with evident chemistry by Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, remain benevolent knuckleheads to the core, accidental protagonists in a story they barely comprehend.

Now in their 50s with side-by-side residences, matching grown daughters (who are BFFs), failing marriages and their band Wyld Stallyns consigned to the proverbial delete bin, Bill and Ted are having, if not existential crises, then definitely a middling middle age.

Before they can really drill down on that, the pair are whisked back to the future by Kelly (Kristen Schaal), daughter of the pair’s former mentor Rufus (the late George Carlin who makes something of a cameo) to answer to her battle-ax mother, now the grand poohbah of the universe who gives them a small window of time and a stack of electric guitars to write the beforementioned planet-saving song.

Logic, such as it is, swiftly goes sideways. Bill and Ted reckon they have already written the crucial song; all they need to do is go to that point in time and retrieve it from themselves. They decide to visit themselves in the future, even though they have been taken by Kelly to hometown San Dimas, California in 2720 A.D.

So actually, as they board that familiar phone booth, they’re really going into the past to reach the future of where they were when Kelly scooped them up. See what I mean? Don’t even. The pair’s daughters, who witness their dad’s ascent (descent?) with Kelly, decide they need to help. But how?

If you guessed time travel of their own, good on you! Soon, music nerd daughters Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and Thea (Samara Weaving) are crossing worlds and millennia recruiting Jimi Hendrix, Mozart, Louis Armstrong and others to assist their fathers as Bill and Ted time-travel and meet ever-more-pathetic versions of their future selves. Even the wives get in on the time-travel act.

It all ends in hell — literally in hell, with flames and devils and tumbling bodies — where Bill and Ted must make nice with former bandmate Death in order to accomplish their mission. Writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon obviously weren’t slacking off though deference to the less is more adage might have been a better strategy than wallpapering the plot with layers of absurdity.

I confess a long-standing and, 1992's Bram Stoker's Dracula notwithstanding, unwavering affection for all things Keanu. I’m also a fan of the original film. But even I found the film’s 90-minute running time draining, its story needlessly, maddeningly convoluted.

I also lamented missed opportunities for in-jokes, sly sub-references, even guerilla fourth-wall demolition hijinks. The original film was, remember, both a cultural touchstone of its era and Reeves’ most iconic pre-Matrix character. Couldn’t this have been a bit more caustic, experimental… fun?

It’s safe to say Bill and Ted are henceforth grounded.

Bill & Ted Face the Music. Directed by Dean Parisot. Starring Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Samara Weaving, Jillian Bell and Kristen Schaal. In select theatres and PVOD August 28.