Not such an excellent adventure
Bill & Ted Face the Music
★★★★★
Dir Dean Parisot
Starring Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Samara Weaving, Brigette Lundypaine, Kristen Schaal, Anthony Carrigan, Holland Taylor
The Bill & Ted films are nobody’s idea of serious cultural milestones, yet three decades ago they unquestionably captured something of the sunny inanity of the age. Released respectively in 1989 and 1991, the time-travelling duo’s Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey today feel like relics of another era – one in which a premise that positioned two dim white male American teens as not just the dead centre of the cosmos but its outright saviours wouldn’t have been shredded on social media faster than you can say, “Be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes”.
But even a time machine disguised as a telephone box can’t stop the march of history. And so 30 years later, we have Bill & Ted Face the Music – in which Bill S Preston, Esq (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) are coming to terms with the fact that they might not have been the most important people in the universe after all.
They’re now middle-aged and no longer remotely famous, and the song that would save the world (and which they were destined to write) has yet to materialise. In other words, there’s a sense time is getting short – and that’s before Kelly (Kristen Schaal), daughter of the duo’s old mentor Rufus (the late George Carlin), informs them they have just 77 minutes and 25 seconds to complete said masterwork or the universe is doomed.
A comedy of unmet potential and unfulfilled dreams is a smarter excuse for exhuming Bill & Ted than some of us imagined we would get. Alas, that core idea is basically all Face the Music has going for it, and the promised bittersweet encore quickly collapses into something resembling a wobbly charity reunion.
Problem one, heartbreakingly, is that Winter and Reeves’s chemistry simply isn’t there. Possibly more awkward still are the pair’s respective teenage daughters, Thea (Samara Weaving) and Billie (Brigette Lundypaine), who feel less like characters in their own right than feeble party-piece impersonations of their fathers’ younger selves, with mannerisms that could be spotted from orbit.
It falls to the girls to use Kelly’s time machine to assemble a historyspanning supergroup – Mozart, Hendrix, Satchmo and so on – who can perform the soon-to-be-legendary song their fathers are meant to be working on, but have instead decided to retrieve from the future, where they’ve already finished it.
When Bill & Ted Face the Music was released on US streaming platforms two weeks ago, that nation’s stillhousebound critics described it as a welcome dose of optimism. But in a country where cinemas have reopened and are crying out for strong new releases, it feels more like a syringeful of diazepam. The agonising wait for the sector’s next adrenalin shot goes on.
In UK cinemas from today