Even so grim a year as 2020 has to have at least one bright spot. That bright spot must surely be Bill and Ted Face the Music. The eponymous pair return after a 25-year hiatus for a most triumphant conclusion to the beloved 80s comedies.
The plot is familiar enough: the duo have to travel through time – while, ironically enough, racing against the clock – in order for their rock band, Wyld Stallyns, to write the prophesied Greatest Song Ever Written to not just unite the world, but save reality itself. Except that this time, Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) travel forward in time to see if their future selves have written the song yet, while their daughters, Thea (Samara Weaving) and Billie (Brigitte Lundy-Paine), travel backwards and assemble a backing band of historical musical dudes – oh, and Death, of course, on bass. Meanwhile, Bill and Ted also have to try and save their marriages and decide whether to succumb to pressure to “grow up” and give up their rock’n’roll dreams.
Like other beloved 80s trilogies like Back to the Future or Indiana Jones (I think we can all agree to forget Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), Bill and Ted has progressed from hit first movie, to less-well-regarded sequel (although Bogus Journey has held up well against its initial disappointed reception), to a rollicking, triumphant conclusion.
Unlike the others, of course, the trilogy has had a 25-year hiatus, which has allowed the characters to age naturally to fit their roles. Of the two, Alex Winter seems the most comfortable slipping back into William S “Bill” Preston’s skin. He so easily reprises the clueless joi de vivre of the 80s movies that he’s just the old Bill with a few wrinkles and a bit of a spread. Keanu Reeves, on the other hand, occasionally seems a little stilted: as has been noted, he’s spent his whole career trying to grow out of being Ted. Otherwise the old chemistry is clearly there: they are clearly having fun.
Theadora “Thea” Preston (Bill’s daughter) and Wilhelmina “Billie” Logan (Ted’s daughter) are a delight, inheriting the goofy charm and boundless optimism of “the Dads”. Brigitte Lundy-Paine in particular nails young Keanu Reeves’s “Whoa, dude!” mannerisms in a way that Reeves himself often struggles with. The choice of the pair having daughters instead of sons is an inspired one: reprising the teenaged Bill and Ted would have been redundant, while writing the characters any other way (say, as the stock Hollywood sullen, cynical teenagers) would have destroyed the whole fun vibe of the film.
Oddly, we partly have the ultra-violent, nihilistic John Wick movies to thank for Face the Music. Series writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon had become close friends with Reeves and Winter while making the first two films, and the foursome had been kicking around the sequel since the mid-2000s. A script was developed by 2011, but studios showed little interest, saying that the originals were too “cult-y” and that Reeves’s star had waned too far since the Matrix films a decade earlier.
Not only did John Wick make Reeves a star again, but the group began appealing directly to fans, spruiking the idea in interviews. Studios began to show some interest at last. Perhaps as a result of the group’s determination to make a movie for the fans – as Ed Solomon says, “We love these characters, they’ve been with us for our whole lives” – one of the most moving sequences in the movie is the end credits: a montage of fan-made videos. In keeping with the ultimate realisation that Bill and Ted’s mission is to bring the music to everyone, the movie makers appealed to fans to send in videos from all over the world of themselves playing music – real or air-guitar didn’t matter, as the sound wasn’t going to be used – and having fun. The result is a montage as heartwarming as the “Heathrow” finale of Love, Actually.
But that’s the key word for Bill and Ted Face the Music: fun.
This is a fun, happy movie. There’s just no other way to describe it. Unlike many latter-day reboots and sequels, there’s no cynicism, no knowing winks at the audience. It’s just a Bill and Ted movie and it doesn’t need to be anything more. As Red Letter Media put it, “A goofy movie about people saving the Earth with positivity”.
The term “wholesome, family movie” usually conjures images of Disney saccharine, but in the case of Bill and Ted Face the Music, it’s a genuine compliment.
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