Bill and Ted Face the Music (2020)
dir. Dean Parisot
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2020 United Artists
Gather round for the latter-day tales of the Two Great Ones, Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan, aka Wyld Stallyns. As we all know, these prophets saved our society from being totally bogus and instead insured our most excellent future.
Ok, we probably don’t all know that.
In fact, there’s a pretty good chance that if you’re under the age of about thirty, you had never heard of these two sweet-natured lunkheads and the perplexing cult status of the late 80s/early 90s movies that featured them: Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.
As someone on the margins of Bill and Ted fandom – I watched both the earlier films around the time of their original release (when I was twelve or so) and liked them, but I didn’t think about them much after that – I was more bemused than anything else when I heard about this newest sequel, Bill and Ted Face the Music.
After revisiting the first two entries in preparation for the new Bill and Ted, I found them both as affable and goofy as I had remembered. They’re the movie equivalent of junk food, to be sure, but guileless and silly enough to be harmless – except for those few dated homophobic slurs that are played for laughs.
I can happily report that Bill and Ted Face the Music is in the exact same vein as its predecessors.
On the surface, there might appear to be something a little deeper on this entry’s mind – dealing with failure and missed opportunities in middle-age – but really, it’s just as frivolous (in a good way!) as the first two. And thankfully – because 2020 has at least some redeeming qualities – it has zero homophobic slurs used as punchlines.
When we last saw our intrepid heroes, their band Wyld Stallyns was climbing the charts and bringing about world peace through their music, as the future prophecy foretold. This was imparted to us in the Bogus Journey credits sequence, in a newspaper montage showing us headlines of their success – my favorite headline is “Wyld Stallyns Play Grand Canyon, Second Show Added.”
But there were ripples of discontent, too. The Grim Reaper, whom Bill and Ted had won to their side during their bogus journey, broke off from the band and started a solo career, not an easy feat for a bass player. (Seriously, if you haven’t seen a Bill and Ted movie, read that last sentence again. These movies are ridiculous.)
Flash forward 25 years. The promised enlightenment of mankind through rock-and-roll never materialized. Wyld Stallyns has been forgotten, and it seems like the harder Bill and Ted try to come up with the song that will unite the world, the less the world cares about them. The only people left who believe in them are their daughters – in a clever bit of retconning, Bill and Ted’s kids, who are introduced as infants at the end of Bogus Journey as “Little Ted” and “Little Bill” are named Theadora “Thea” Preston and Wilhelmina “Billie” Logan.
In the future, The Great Leader has decided the only way to right the timeline is for Bill and Ted to die. The popularity of their music will surge if they are struck down, so she sends a killer robot back in time to finish them off. The Great Leader’s daughter, Kelly, disagrees with her mother, and also heads back in time to save the middle-aged rockers.
Here the movie goes in two separate directions. Thea and Billie find a time travel transport and go back in time to round up the best back-up band that has ever existed, so that the song will be a sure hit. In a nod to Excellent Adventure, Thea and Billie’s subplot finds them convincing a handful of historical figures, including Jimi Hendrix, Louis Armstrong, and Mozart, to travel with them to the future. Meanwhile, Bill and Ted travel to different points in the future in their own time machine in an attempt to steal the world-changing song from themselves, since they can’t seem to come up with it on their own.
Any navel-gazing about existential crisis or these old guys reflecting on the squandered opportunities of their youth is delightfully cast aside in favor of a silly mad-cap adventure that keeps the gas pedal to the floor for the whole picture.
As it should be.
The best moments are the goofiest. The intimidating robot – what we initially think is a soulless killing machine – shows himself to be a shy, fragile doofus. One of the biggest laughs for me was when this gleaming-white, hulking metal construction revealed his name – Dennis Caleb McCoy. Actor Anthony Carrigan – who donned an uncomfortable 40-pound suit which he called a “silicone oven” – is pitch perfect as Dennis. You realize how absurd Face the Music will be the first time Carrigan’s voice breaks from an ominous booming bass to that of a weakling kid who might delight in being a tattletale.
Alex Winter, as Bill, and Keanu Reeves, as Ted, slip seamlessly back into the rolls of the non-bogus airheads. There is a touch of melancholy to these older versions of Bill and Ted. They don’t use nearly as many of their trademark superlatives – like resplendent or heinous – but seeing them is like seeing old friends.
A strength of the movie is getting to see multiple versions of Bill and Ted. As the best buds drop in on themselves at several points in the future, we get to see British glam-rock Bill and Ted, prison Bill and Ted, and super-old Bill and Ted. The make-up department for Face the Music put together some terrific appliances for each of these pairs. And as you can imagine, the special effects are light-years ahead of 1989/1991 CGI capabilities.
The real performance highlight of Bill and Ted Face the Music is Brigette Lundy-Paine as Ted’s daughter, Billie. The actor – who identifies as non-binary, and prefers they/them pronouns – slays it in their interpretation of Keanu Reeves’s goofy demeanor. Their physicality – down to the smallest hand gesture – and facial expressions are a carbon copy of Reeves’s performance from Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey. If there is no other reason to see Face the Music, Lundy-Paine’s hilariously daffy performance is more than worth the price of admission.
All those strengths balance out some of the weaker points of the movie. Holland Taylor as the Great Leader and Kristen Schaal as her daughter Kelly aren’t given much to do, and both are basically wasted. Ditto William Sadler. It was great to see the actor reprise his role as The Grim Reaper, but the movie mostly leaves him on the sidelines.
The end of the film culminates in something I would usually find refreshing – a hopeful call to find unity and harmony through the power of music. It struck me, however, as facile and naïve. Maybe I’ve just been beaten down too much by 2020 and the current horrific circumstances of a President who is insisting he won’t give up power if he loses the election. Bill and Ted Face the Music, like the other movies in the series, is a fun and harmless diversion, but the “solution” of sharing the love of good music seems pretty useless in the face of our current problems.
Why it got 3 stars:
- Bill and Ted Face the Music is good, clean harmless fun. If you’re a Bill and Ted super-fan, you should love it. As a marginal fan, I had plenty of fun with it.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- A wave of nostalgia washed over me as the old school Orion Pictures logo appeared on the screen at the start of the movie.
- I don’t want to spoil it, but there’s a pretty epic cameo from an early 90s rock icon that is glorious.
- Station!
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Watched on VOD through Vudu.