Bill and Ted Face The Music (dir. Dean Parisot, 2020) — Review

The endearingly cheesy practical effects of the original are gone. But Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, revisiting their rock-loving slackers in full middle-aged himbodom, are historical artefacts in themselves. Bill and Ted, the highschoolers whom we first encountered “failing heinously” in history class in 1989, returned for their fluffy, low-stakes threequel in the throes of the pandemic.

While the original B&T was a sort of Doctor Who/Mark Twain/Spinal Tap mashup, with two relatively unknown actors blundering puppishly through Napoleonic battles and Renaissance England, Bill and Ted Face The Music languished in development hell for fifteen years before being greenlit off the success off John Wick. The long-delayed third instalment, with its midlife-crisis-faded-celebrity plotline, presumably cuts close to the bone for Alex Winter (the non-John Wick of the pair) — but if so, it doesn’t show. Instead, amidst a glut of edgy, dystopian, oh-so-clever sci-fis and 80s reboots, Bill and Ted 3 continues riding high on the absurd, sweetly sincere idealism that set it aside from the stoner comedies of its original era.

Let’s be realistic: the franchise has never concerned itself overly with plot: frankly, a welcome change after the intricate black-hole physics of Christopher Nolan et al. For those unfamiliar with the original, Bill and Ted remain eerily unchanged from their high-school days, even if the sight of Reeves without a beard (though sporting the John Wick bob) seems a little discomfiting. Who knew the man had a chin? Happily, Reeves has left his hard-man stunt training at the door, made obvious in an opening sequence which sees him playing the theremin (and bagpipes, and trumpet) with the arm movements of a frog in a blender.

Bill and Ted Face The Music returns, loosely, to the prophecy introduced in the earlier films: Bill and Ted (and their band Wyld Stallyns) will write the ultimate song that will unite the universe and bring about world peace. Alas, thirty years on, things haven’t quite worked out. Their music is going from bad to worse, their wives can’t even get them to couples therapy without each other, and their sole achievement seems to be their daughters — each named after their dad’s best friend. Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and Thea (Samara Weaving) are fine-tuned to appeal to this generation’s version of the ‘slacker’, as Ted’s long-suffering father points out: “They're twenty-four. They live at home, and they're unemployed.” Being ‘Little Bill’ and ‘Little Ted’ has gone from from being cute to a curse: all these androgynous, goofy kids do is sit around dissecting the bass riffs in obscure prog-rock albums. Hashtag relatable, apparently.

Bill and Ted’s wacky adventures! and bizarre encounters! with their own variously transformed selves run in parallel with the attempts of Thea and Billie to assemble their own universe-saving supergroup on their dads’ behalf. They travel back to the 1960s and recruit Jimi Hendrix (DazMann Still); to the 1920s to pick up Louis Armstrong (Jeremiah Craft); and then to 18th-century Salzburg to enlist Mozart (Daniel Dorr). The choice of classical musician represents a grievous missed opportunity — the writers could have done with a visit to London’s Handel and Hendrix Museum, a townhouse once occupied by both legends. But of course the most powerful musician of all is the Grim Reaper from Bergman’s Seventh Seal, first encountered in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey — a very welcome resurrection of Death, William Sandler’s Seventh Seal spoof, denizen of the underworld and master of the 40-minute bass solo.

The failure to give Weaving and Lundy-Paine anything really funny to do poses the film’s biggest problem. But for those content with plenty of low-stakes character development and dawdling, there are flashes of unexpected pleasure, such as Dennis the robot. Introduced as a bland sci-fi trope, Anthony Carrigan’s icy-eyed killing machine quickly crumbles into a paranoiacally guilty humanoid, perking up the sad, dumpy CGI backgrounds that dominate the film’s third act. Unfortunately, the final universe-saving song and the Zoom-worthy backdrops culminate in a truly pandemic-era resolution, recalling Gal Gadot’s crowdsourced “Imagine” music video — this one with fewer celebrities.

A sequel of rare sincerity, Bill & Ted Face the Music avoids feeling like a craven reviving of a hollowed-out IP or a cynical reboot, mostly because its ambition is the stuff of affection — for what the filmmakers are doing, made with sympathy for their audience and a genuine desire to explore these characters in a new context. Maybe that’s the despair talking. Or maybe it’s just the relief of for once confronting the past and finding that it has aged considerably well. Party on, dudes!