Bill And Ted Face The Music

“We thought this was about the music,” says Billie Logan (Brigette Lundy-Paine).

“It is.  It’s also about the end of space and time,” replies Kelly (Kristen Schaal).

Is it strange writing about a movie depicting the end of the world in the middle of the worst pandemic in a century?  Is it stranger still that fictional characters can take the end of the world more seriously than your average American?

The central theme of BILL AND TED FACE THE MUSIC is maturity.  I recently spoke with screenwriter Ed Solomon, who together with college pal Chris Matheson transformed sketch comedy characters into the Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter), and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) we know.   For thirty years, Bill and Ted tried to write the song to save the world.  But tensions in their band, Wyld Stallyns, come to a head when fellow members Elizabeth and Joanna—a.k.a. “the Princesses”, a.k.a. “the Babes”, a.k.a. Bill and Ted’s wives—express their dissatisfaction with being second class to Bill and Ted’s idealist endeavor as well as their codependency.  In a joint counseling session, neither Bill nor Ted bring themselves to say, “I,” without inserting, “and Bill/Ted.”

Following a brief montage of scenes from BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE and BILL AND TED’S BOGUS JOURNEY, time unravels, sending historical characters and recognizable monuments to 2020.  Why is never important in these films.  Explanations aren’t the point.  Missy was Bill’s mom, and Ted’s mom.  Now she’s marrying Ted’s younger brother, Deacon (Beck Bennett).  This is more of an in joke for those who’ve followed along since 1989, but it drops us back into their lives in a funny way.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.   Not coincidentally, the Tibetan chant-and-Theremin song fails to impress all but daughters Billie (Lundy-Paine) and Thea (Samara Weaving) who jam to it, unconcerned that the music isn’t remotely rhythmic in any sense.  But this is the first hint that the girls’ understanding of music history and theory may surpass that of their fathers.

And so the four play out different tracks.  Bill and Ted chase a pair of future stereo phonies—”future us’s” in their Valley parlance—in an attempt to steal from themselves the Song To Unite The World.  Their daughters partner up with Kelly, whose father Rufus (the late George Carlin) guided their dads through the Circuits of Time in the original film, to sample the works of musicians from different eras—Jimi Hendrix (DazMann Still), Louis Armstrong (Jeremiah Craft), and Mozart (Daniel Dorr), among others.

We can see the influences of these films on others.  Note the philosophical discussions in WAYNE’S WORLD and WAYNE’S WORLD 2 with Stephen Tyler and Alice Cooper.  These might be a direct reference to the appearance of James Martin of Faith No More in BOGUS JOURNEY. The gag replays here in a cameo by rapper and physics enthusiast, Kid Cudi.

It sounds heady, but it works on the strength of the actors believing the preposterous yet good natured story that wants earnestly to transcend the product of its time that EXCELLENT ADVENTURE was.  I’ve tried for many years to put my finger on exactly what sets 80’s comedies apart from the films that have, in the decades since, tried and failed to emulate their spirit.  A brief resurgence in the first decade of the new millennium owes in large measure to Amy Heckerling’s CLUELESS—an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma.  Roger Ebert wrote that the characters’ lack of cynicism, versus the typical over-reliance on crass humor, made the film the delight that it is.

In that vein, one highlight of this franchise is William Sadler’s spirited performance in BOGUS JOURNEY as Death.  Inspired by Bergman’s THE SEVENTH SEAL, the sequel has Bill and Ted play for their lives against the hooded reaper of souls.  Chess, of course, is beyond them, so they play several rounds of games they understand—Battleship, Twister, and so on.  After returning to the world of the living, Death joins the band as an upright bass player.  In 1990, no one foresaw the villain in DIE HARD 2 would make for the funniest moments of a BILL AND TED movie.

In FACE THE MUSIC, the standout is Anthony Carrigan (BARRY) as a bumbling murderbot named Dennis Caleb McCoy.  He’s sent back through time to kill Bill and Ted.  When he fails, he experiences a nervous breakdown. Carrigan plays the character as a truly distraught boy, with none of the self-awareness of these kinds of comic relief characters who might otherwise seem superfluous in a movie that’s already set as a comedy.  But it works because of how straight-faced Carrigan, like Sadler before him, plays it.

Reeves and Winter have fun with myriad versions of themselves, including as a pair of vaguely British-sounding rockers.  Here Reeves’ deadpan delivery works better for the guileless fourth-wall breaking delivery of, “Us being here is humorously ironic,” far better than it plays in the JOHN WICK series.  And it takes a brave actor to make fun of his own inability to effect a believable British accent—a fact for which he received tremendous ribbing over his performance as Jonathan Harker in Coppola’s DRACULA.  Reeves and Winter understand Bill and Ted’s charm is that they’re unflinchingly honest even when they’re literally arguing with themselves.

And ultimately it’s that sincerity with which the film is made.   Director Dean Parisot (GALAXY QUEST) and writers Matheson and Solomon will never top the original magic but that wasn’t the goal here.  It’s endearing to see these characters grow up.  As Solomon tells me, it’s really in a way about his and Matheson’s evolution.  They created these characters in their twenties, and are candid about their mistakes.  The prevalence of “fag” as a pejorative in 80’s comedies stuck out as a shortcoming in the otherwise sublime EXCELLENT ADVENTURE the writers openly regret with full accountability.  But the two make amends with a story that cedes control of the future to a younger, more mindful generation.  That gets to the core of what these movies were always about.

If Bill and Ted, or Chris and Ed, can be excellent to each other and to others, then perhaps we can, too.