“Bill & Ted Face the Music” is like a gift in a dream. You’re visiting old friends, familiar gags, and an aged brand of whimsy gives you a microdose of nostalgia that doesn’t make you choke. When it ends, it’s an emotional jolt. With WYLD STALLIONS ringing in your ears and the mantra ‘be excellent to each other” in your heart; something so simple seems impossible in this dark timeline of 2020.
In “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” George Carlin’s Rufus travels through time to help Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) complete a high school assignment and assure that their destiny as the WYLD STALLIONS would unite the world with music. Next, “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” through time, heaven and hell stave off hostile forces from the future to get closer to realising their purpose.
Decades later, the duo are now middle-aged dads growing tired of their task when Kelly (Kristen Schaal) – Rufus’ daughter – arrives from the future to tell them the time has come for them to deliver the song that will unite the world. Feeling hopeless, Bill and Ted decide to go through time to get the music from their future selves.
It feels like the late 80s and early 90s time period is having something of a moment in 2020. “The Karate Kid” has been revived as “Cobra Kai,” Oasis have been surging back up the streams, and now Bill & Ted come back with 29 years between thrashing licks on their air guitars. Writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon have dusted off the script they’ve had under the bed since at least 2011, offering second chances and making us once again believe that two little guys from the fictional San Dimas can change the world.
Matheson and Solomon’s time travelling offerings are defined by deeply satisfying silliness and a blinding optimism. The latest entry into the series though, the assembly of the ultimate band to save the world and the space-time continuum, has a surprisingly soggy heart.
If there’s anything that I didn’t like in “Face The Music” it’s that it’s the least technically satisfying of the series. Besides the “Behind the Music” style introduction, the whole feeling of the film lacks visual energy. The digital photography and the buffet of visual effects used to travel through time, create inter-dimensional locations that are oddly washed out and bland compared to the visceral energy of the previous films.
Director Dean Parisot (“Galaxy Quest”), editor Don Zimmerman (“Ace Ventura Pet Detective”) and cinematographer Shelly Johnson (“Captain America: The First Avenger”) set the ‘hang’ vibe, but the locations don’t register as much as little laugh out loud details in each place. On a detour through hell to collect Sadler’s Death, his hillside home looks like (to use “Heat” parlance) a dead-tech, post-modern bullshit home of a studio executive, which reeks of almost a decade of death knocks by Matheson and Solomon trying to get this thing made.
Seeing William Sadler’s Death makes you want to bum rush the screen and hug him. The ensemble, like Parisot’s “Galaxy Quest,” distracts from everything else happening in the frame. Samara Weaving’s Thea and Brigette Lundy-Paine’s Billie deliver the naive vibrance of the movie. As the secondary plot, they bring that goofy innocence to their music geek’s “Midnight in Paris”-style recruiting drive through musical history. While I prefer my Samara Weaving stained with blood, dishing out violence (“Ready or Not” and “Guns Akimbo”); the introduction to Brigette Lundy-Paine and their incredible inhabitation of that Keanu energy, was a delight. Anthony Carrigan almost steals the movie as a time-travelling robotic assassin with a hilarious name.
No-one could – nor should – play Bill and Ted except Reeves and Winter. Both artists brim with integrity, they are soldiers of cinematic joy in front and behind the camera for decades. Back in the saddle after nearly three decades, the lines on their faces inflect doubt in their brimming positivity and hope. “Be excellent to each other” is harder to say with mileage. You find yourself looking at their faces like mirrors to your own experience.
There’s a moment where Ted is confessing to Bill that he’s been making enquiries about selling his vintage Les Paul guitar. When Reeves’ voice strains, I felt a lurch like I was going to have to stop this thing and ball my eyes out. Mixed with these moments are Reeves and Winter almost busting through the fourth wall with fun as they heartily mock themselves as a variety of future versions of themselves, which you may have seen teased in the trailers.
“Bill & Ted Face The Music” is like “A Christmas Carol” without the closure. The ghosts of past present and future are the many Bill’s and Ted’s we see portrayed through time. When the movie began, I yearned to be a part of my band of film-loving friends in a packed theatre. By the end of the movie, I relished the privacy to sob quietly. We are Ebenezer Scrooge; we have seen the past, present and cackled at proposed futures. As the credits roll, I want to believe in a song, a movie.
