Bill & Ted Face the Music is the Sequel America Needs Now

Sometimes a movie just turns out better than it should. The premise is tired, or it’s a sequel to a series that everyone (probably rightly) thought was long dead, or it’s made by a director or studio that you have deservedly lost all confidence in. Yet it works. Something about it, the writing, the way all the main actors commit to their roles, the fact that updated effects actually managed to make a difference. It just works. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a great example of this; a pointless cash-grab decades-late sequel that’s somehow hilarious and just plain enjoyable to watch. The first Pirates of the Caribbean; a movie based on a goddamn theme park ride with no real justification for its existence that somehow became one of the cornerstone adventure movies of my childhood works here too.

Bill & Ted Face the Music, out now in the more risk-taking movie theaters and on Amazon, is perhaps the best example of this type of movie I’ve ever seen.

Some of you are not going to believe me when I say it’s a genuinely good movie, a scifi comedy with more laughs than it knows what to do with and a real heart with a story you actually care about. I don’t blame you. The last Bill & Ted movie, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, came out in 1991, a year before I was born. It includes a scene in which our heroes defeat the Grim Reaper in a game of Battleship that is also somehow a deliberate, almost earnest homage to The Seventh Seal, the movie your overly pretentious friend made you watch in college with that one scene that kid’s cartoons have been spoofing for decades. Despite the inarguable genius of that scene, Bogus Journey overall was maybe a little more bogus than it wanted to be.

And while Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was indeed…exceptional (I mean, if you don’t believe “strange things are afoot at the Circle K” to be proof mainstream American comedy writing can reach the levels of Shakespeare then you are clearly much too cynical or need to smoke a little more weed) it still came out in 1989, over 31 years ago. It was still (to appease the sober cynics among us) just a harmless stoner comedy about two laid-back if loquacious dudes trying to pass a history final in the hope that their music could change the world. It’s a movie most people of my generation remember as some half-watched part of mid-afternoon programming on Comedy Central.

It was bigger for a while. For a while, that cult comedy from the late eighties was pretty popular. It spawned two different early nineties TV shows (one animated, one not), multiple different crappy early nineties video games, a comic, and a cereal. For about four years in the late eighties and early nineties, those bodacious dudes were everywhere.

And then they went and disappeared.

It wasn’t dramatic or anything. They didn’t just disappear into the weird awful-CGI time travel tubes that look like the worst desktop screensaver the nineties could imagine. One gets the feeling that these guys were just way too nice for an Irish goodbye or to get caught up in any sort of scandal. But they faded from the cultural consciousness. We (most of us, anyway) moved on. Culture changed. Music changed. Hair metal was already on the way out in 1989; at this point it’s about as relevant to popular music culture as theoretical astrophysics is relevant to the well-being of your neighbor’s annoying poodle. Malls don’t matter anymore. George Carlin died and the world never really recovered. Keanu Reeves became Neo. Then he got really sad and needed to avenge a dog. Sometime before that he even saved a bus. 29 years passed since Bill & Ted last made anyone any money. And while I will die on the hill proclaiming the Wyld Stallyns as perhaps the greatest fictional band of all time, the unfortunate truth is that in 2020 it’s hard for anyone to imagine a song changing the world. Hair metal or not.

We forgot how to be excellent to each other.

Bill & Ted Face the Music is here to teach us how once again.

It doesn’t start where you’d expect it to, it starts with failure. Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) are now well into their middle age and have NOT written the song that will unite the world. They’re still married to the princesses from the first movie and they’ve been banging their (stoney) heads against the wall the last thirty or so years trying to fulfill the destiny that was thrust upon them. They thought they were headed for a life of fame and music and peace on earth, instead they’re playing relative’s weddings and $2 taco nights at dive bars.

They also each have a daughter. Thea (Bill’s daughter, played by Samara Weaving) and Billie (Ted’s daughter, played by Brigette Lundy-Paine) are essentially the female, millennial versions of their stoner fathers. They are probably the smartest additions to this improbably smart movie, bringing both the music and the (somewhat stoney) culture and vibe into the modern day. No marijuana is shown at all in this movie (or, to my memory, in either earlier movie), but one imagines great billowing clouds of smoke in garages full of musical instruments or lots of bong rips punctuating long, winding conversations about the lifesaving philosophy of music, dude.

Then the time-travel plot kicks in. While Bill & Ted (and their daughters to some extent) have been overthinking their pre-destined song to the point that they are shown to include throat singing and an overused theremin in their music, the future they were supposed to create has been fading away bit by bit. If they don’t actually perform the song by 7:17 present-day San Dimas time then not only will they have failed their destiny to unite the world, all of time and space will collapse. Do NOT try to puzzle out the time travel logic to this movie, only Kid Cudi can do that. This was his role in the movie.

Two separate time travel adventures then take place. I would say they take place simultaneously, but, you know…time travel stuff. Bill & Ted visit their future selves to see if they can steal the reality-saving-song from them once they’ve actually written it (I know, fucking genius). Meanwhile their daughters, Thea and Billie, end up on a more fun retread of the first movie in which they venture through history to create the greatest backing band of all time to help their dads.

That’s just the basic outline of the setup. I don’t want to go into any more detail than that. Not because the plot is some Game of Thrones-esque labyrinth of twists and betrayals, but because it’s just so goddamn enjoyable that I don’t want to risk ruining it. Suffice it to say that by the end, you do care if Bill & Ted & Thea & Billie can actually pull it off. You’ll have laughed a lot as Bill & Ted meet and are variously repulsed by or jealous of their future selves. You’ll be weirdly impressed by Keanu’s acting ability (especially if, like me, you watched the John Wick movies rather recently), how he seems like such a happy, non-threatening, kinda stupid guy after so many years as a badass. You’ll be surprised by how much the effects improved. You’ll wonder where you’ve seen that robot before (it’s Noho Hank from Barry). You’ll agree that Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-Paine pulled off the best Bill & Ted character parody you’ve seen and it always felt natural.

But most of all, you’ll come away happy with how innocently goofy this movie is. Just like the first two. And this is what makes it such a good sequel, despite being perhaps a quarter century late. It sticks to the exact tone and feel that made the original movies so great while widening the scope and the cast and admitting that there is more music worthy of obsession than just classic rock made by white dudes. That niceness inherent in both Bill and Ted and Billie and Thea (their entire character arc is built around helping out their dads just cause they love ’em) is an almost radical, subversive thing in 2020. We don’t trust nice characters anymore. We expect them to be hiding something. Even Captain America has some darkness now, and no one gives a shit about Superman anymore. But Bill & Ted are still just some nice, laid-back, stoney dudes from some nothing part of southern California who want to play their music and make the world a better place.

That’s something we just don’t celebrate or believe in anymore. Bill & Ted Face the Music wants to change that. It’s wants you to enjoy yourself and listen to some good music.

It reminds you despite everything, despite your fears and the darkness that modern pop culture is embracing more and more; that the best time to be is still now.

Watch it. Maybe you’ll find it as triumphant an experience as I did.