Out of time: why Bill and Ted should stay in the 90s
What a strange time for Bill and Ted to return from self-imposed purgatory, the best part of three decades on from their last turn in the spotlight in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991). Strange, not just because their wide-eyed, rocker/slacker shtick seems weirdly inconsequential in the era of coronavirus and Black Lives Matter, but also because star Keanu Reeves needs a moment in the sun rather less than he did 10 years ago, thanks in large part to the success of the deeply average yet undoubtedly entertaining John Wick movies.
Reeves is already in the midst of a comeback, the world has already woken up to the fact that it rather missed him, and Bill and Ted Face the Music is unlikely to change much about the future direction of his mid-to-late-era career. We’ll still be getting a new Matrix movie, with Reeves returning as Neo, for instance. And one imagines John Wick will still be taking down Russian bad guys well into his twilight years. Nonetheless, here we are with a new Bill and Ted movie.
In Bill and Ted Face the Music, the first trailer for which was released this week, Reeves returns as Ted “Theodore”
Logan, alongside Alex Winter as Bill S Preston, Esq. (Winter, who went largely missing from the big screen at the same time as Bill last appeared on it, has been talking up Bill and Ted Face the Music for what seems like at least a decade.) Both characters have aged extremely well.
It turns out the dudesome duo never did create a solar-system-spanning utopia fuelled by power chords and rock-star poses, as revealed at the end of Bogus Journey, and are now middle-aged has-beens playing to crowds numbering in the dozens who are mostly there for $2 taco night. Precoronavirus,
this probably seemed like an existence comparable to languishing in one of Dante’s nine circles of Hades to the screenwriters. In the current circumstances, the idea of being able to even attend a rock show and eat Mexican food in the company of more than a handful of one’s fellow human beings – let alone stand on a stage and play music – seems like the most gilded and fabulous existence imaginable.
As a conveniently retroactive reveal, Bill and Ted’s apparent failure to save the world in Bogus Journey is a bit like the moment in Terminator 3 where we discover the machine apocalypse was not, after all, averted during the events of the previous (much better) movie. Perhaps the clue to this belated do-over lies in the continuing existence of that infamous time-travelling phone box, in which (having failed to write the song that saves the known universe from imminent destruction) the guys soon find themselves travelling to the future to steal it from their elder selves. We’ll have to wait for the movie to discover why these older Bill and Teds appear to be the same age but grossly buffed up and covered in prison tattoos.
Reeves divides opinion because he is one of those Hollywood A-listers for whom the term “actor” seems not quite to apply. He does not even have the intense, idiosyncratic screen presence of a Schwarzenegger or Eastwood, and yet there is nobody else quite like him on the big screen. In his best-known movies (Point Break, The Matrix, Speed), he is always the likable, taciturn presence, rather than the revelatory central figure. He seems not to be doing much, yet we cannot imagine those movies with another actor in the role of central pivot. Reeves may not be able to play anybody else but himself, yet there is a calm, unshowy charisma about his performances, like a sportsman whose unselfish teamplay helps the more technical players around him to show off their fancy skills.
Bill and Ted Face the Music seems to be the perfect movie for middle-aged fellows who never quite realised their dreams, and would love to think that they retain the power to transform the world just by plugging in a guitar amp and striking a Jesus Christ pose. Perhaps that’s just what the world needs right now, in the midst of all the death, destruction and righteous angst permeating the news. Or perhaps Bill and Ted really should jump back in their phone box and get the hell back to the early 90s while they still have the chance.
• This story was amended on 11 June 2020 to correct the name of a film. Keanu Reeves starred in Point Break not Point Blank.