“The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing...” “That’s us, dude!” Bill S. Preston Esq and Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan once remarked to each other. How much wisdom there is in getting the loveable metalhead misfits back together for another time-travelling caper, two decades after their last, has been hotly debated since word first emerged of this sequel. In 1989, screenwriters Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon scored a cult sleeper hit with Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, a big-hearted romp about two hard-rocking high-schoolers who rescue their history grades by zapping back in time to meet Genghis Khan, So-Crates and co first hand. Its 1991 sequel upped the ante, forcing the pair to avert an impending apocalypse, face Death himself and win a local Battle Of The Bands. Where else was there for the slackers’ story to go?
The answer is: backwards. Bill & Ted Face The Music’s plot may send the Wyld Stallyns forward in time, but this threequel mainly rehashes past glories, neglecting new material for a Greatest Hits compilation of beats from the franchise’s first films. This is not altogether a bad thing. A clear labour of love for Matheson and Solomon, who’ve been working on script drafts for a Bill & Ted threequel since 2010 but struggled to get studio backing until star Keanu Reeves’ post-John Wick career renaissance, the film delivers a punchy reminder of why audiences fell for the rockers in the first place. Yet it’s hard not to feel an opportunity has been missed to tell a most excellent new story.
Time has been far from excellent to the air-guitar-loving airheads when we’re reunited with them. Middle-aged and living in suburbia, their band is going nowhere, unless you count gigs at $2 taco nights and wedding receptions, playing experimental theremin jazz wig-outs to bemused extended family members and quesadilla enthusiasts. They’re still married to the medieval princesses (Jayma Mays and Erinn Hayes in recast roles) they met in Excellent Adventure, but only just: one early scene paints the pair as Step Brothers-esque inseparables, who can’t even attend couples’ therapy to save their marriages without each other, much to their maidens’ misery.
Despite the protestations of adoring daughters Thea (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and Billie (Samara Weaving), the duo are contemplating the unthinkable as the film’s first act hits its stride: giving up their rock ’n’ roll dream. “We’ve spent our entire lives trying to unite the world. And I’m tired, dude,” Ted wearily confesses. It’s at this point a messenger named Kelly (Kristen Schaal) drops out of the sky in what looks like a futuristic egg-timer, with an urgent warning for the two pals. Reality is unravelling, and it’s up to Bill and Ted to write a track so good it mends the very fabric of space and time.
Cranks the nostalgia up to 11 as it sends the Wyld Stallyns on a time-travelling tour of old gags.
What follows is a medley of things we’ve seen before. Characters dying and finding themselves in Hell with the Grim Reaper (William Sadler). Journeys through time encountering heavyweights from history. Bill and Ted coming up against alternative versions of themselves (like Bogus Journey’s robot replicas, the friends face their bloated, alcoholic future selves in one funny scene involving ridiculous English accents). There are fleeting moments of hilarity, but the alchemy’s not quite right. Weaving and Lundy-Paine are a lot of fun as the duo’s daughters, but essentially are left to play cover versions of their delinquent dads, spending the movie on a separate adventure.
Would it have been more interesting to have these characters as rap music-loving millennials who Bill and Ted have to win the respect of, by proving the power of rock? The world has changed remarkably since the 1980s, whose counterculture Bill and Ted so charmingly personified. Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey were movies about young, dumb optimists who believed world peace could be achieved through power chords and pyrotechnics. A plot that did more to grapple with the ways the world has moved on without them, via the generational gap between them and their daughters, may have given the film the emotional heft it’s missing at times. Bill and Ted may face the music here, but they don’t face a lot of character development.
But, like, whatever, as the pair would probably shrug. Bill & Ted Face The Music does what it needs to do, cranking the nostalgia up to 11 as it sends the Wyld Stallyns on a time-travelling tour of old gags, concluding with the much-needed message that we should all be excellent to each other. If that’s all you want from a Bill & Ted sequel, then party on, dudes.
