THEY’RE BACK, DUDE!
Bill and Ted hit the big screen
Let’s assume you’ve already braved the return to cinemas, devoured Tenet, and figured out both its puzzling chronology and the mystery of inverted time. Now you’re looking for a new temporal challenge? Excellent! Just remember, there are infinite pasts, each entangled with infinite futures. Or if that fails, “Party on, dude!”
Bill & Ted Face the Music is indeed a head trip, as the heroes of the throwaway 1989 comedy Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure return for a third go — they also made Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey in 1991 — at saving the spacetime continuum.
Just why it’s in danger is a little unclear, or maybe I was distracted by yet a third casting of wives Elizabeth and Joanna — Erinn Hayes and Jayma Mays this time out — by actors significantly younger than their original portrayers are now. They claim to have been born in the early 15th century, to which I say: Yea, verily?
Slightly more age appropriate are Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-Paine as Thea and Billie — little Ted and little Bill! — 20-something daughters of the two would-be musicians.
Or wouldn’t-be. As the opening scenes explain, the creatively spelled Wyld Stallyns struggled for years to produce some civilization-saving tunes, only to flame out and disband. Their wives say they’ve been banging their heads against a wall for 25 years, which some rockers would count as a successful musical career, but whatever.
They’re now contacted by an emissary from the future — George Carlin having died in 2008, Kristen Schaal steps in as his daughter — with the news that they really, really need to save the world this time, for realsies.
The consequences of failure are already playing out as historical figures and objects start to pop in and out of their proper places in space-time. I mean, can you imagine the mayhem if the Eiffel Tower were to suddenly appear in Las Vegas?
Bill and Ted snap into action, determining that the best way to get their hands on a world-saving piece of music is to steal it from their future selves. (First stop, 2022 California, refreshingly pandemic-free.) Their daughters, meanwhile, decide to gather a truly historic supergroup to back them up.
Members of the band span from the present day — who knew Grammy-winning rapper Kid Cudi had such a grasp of theoretical physics? — to the depths of prehistory, with Patty Anne Miller playing Grom from 11,500 BC, best drummer in history. This will come as some surprise to Keith Moon, Charlie Watts and Al Jackson Jr., though perhaps not to Ringo.
The messy plot borrows heavily from The Terminator — Anthony Carrigan plays a futuristic killing machine with a bizarrely prosaic name — but the film lives or dies on the ability of Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter to successfully re-inhabit their former characters. The good news is they do so as well as anybody could. The bad news is that the third movie only makes it clear how little personality these two have, aside from the odd catchphrase. And their perennial-slacker shtick is far more comically appealing in young men than in two, um, dudes in their mid-50s.
Although it is funny to imagine the lengths to which hair and makeup had to go to make the two look like they had aged similarly. Reeves is keeping in fighting form in preparation to play a super-assassin in two more chapters of the John Wick franchise. Whereas Winter hasn’t exactly let himself go, but does spend most of his time these days behind a camera as a director, and doesn’t have to look like he could kill someone with a pencil.
Bill & Ted Face the Music has been ably directed by Dean Parisot (Galaxy Quest, RED 2) and scripted by returning writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, whom you can see in cameo roles as demons in Hell. Hey, I didn’t think it was that bad.