Bill & Ted Face the Music (4/5 Stars)

 

More than most other film franchises, Bill & Ted seems to benefit consistently from low expectations and the suspension of disbelief. The premise of the original movie involved two teenage boys from San Dimas California that dream about being rock-stars, call each other dude, and implore the people they meet to “Be Excellent to Each Other.” They are met by Rufus, a time-traveler from the future, (played by George Carlin), who informs them that they have a glorious destiny to unite the world in song but first have to pass a high-school history presentation. To help them in this regard, he lets Bill & Ted use his time machine to round up historical figures to help them pass. The film somehow works. I think it is because, although Bill & Ted know nothing about history, the movie itself is surprisingly literate. Importantly, the movie is also not snobbish about its education. It perceives the historical figures not as lofty great men, but people, and finds fun in what these people would think of the 1980s. It works much like Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” would work like twenty years later. It is enthusiastic about the past but never uses that knowledge as a platform for superiority. It treats history in a most inclusive, accessible, and excellent way. A tip of the hat to the writers of all three movies, Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon. Also, San Dimas High School Football Rules!

Bill & Ted Face the Music keeps intact all of the elements of what made the first Bill & Ted movies work and does just enough to differentiate itself into a new movie. It is a more of a concluding chapter than a breaker of new territory however. There is time travel (like the first movie) and a trip to Hell (like the second movie), but no new surreal concept. What it concerns itself with is the tying up of loose ends. It was foretold in the first movie that Prescott and Logan would write and perform a song that would unite the world. In this movie, we see that destiny fulfilled.

The entanglements of time and heaven/hell travel are given the briefest of surface logic, which is fine for the movie’s purposes. Now middle-aged and so far unsuccessful in uniting the world in song, Bill & Ted are met by the daughter of Rufus (played by Kristen Schaal) who informs them that the world is going to end later that day unless the foretold song is played at a very specific time and place. How specific? Well the movie is about 95 minutes long and Kristen Schall says this at around the fifteen-minute mark, so like in 75 minutes. Classic Bill & Ted movie logic.

But Bill & Ted have not written the song yet. It has been twenty-five years they have been trying to do the same, so how could they do it now by the end of the movie. More Classic Bill & Ted movie logic coming up:

-        Wait, haven’t we been foretold to write this song. That must mean that we are going to do it. We have a time machine, why don’t we just go to the future when we have written the song and take it from ourselves.

-        Excellent idea.

-        Wait, except won’t that be stealing?

-        How is that stealing, when we’re stealing it from ourselves, dude?

But the thing is, it is stealing, and older versions of Bill & Ted don’t like what these younger versions are up to. They excoriate them for being selfish and cutting corners. These are the funniest scenes in the movie with double Alex Winters and Keanu Reeves light-heartedly arguing with each other about time travel ethics.

Meanwhile, Bill & Ted now have two daughters, Billie and Thea, who seem to be the very rare kind of teenagers who believe their parents are to be emulated and impersonated. They want to help and engage in their own most excellent adventure into the past to form a supergroup of all ages. Amongst the greats on their list: Jimi Hendrix, Louis Armstrong, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. They have great taste in music. It is unfortunate though that the artists play their most well-known songs. For Armstrong (played by Jeremiah Craft) that is “When the Saints Go Marching In.” I can think of ten other pieces of music I would have rather heard him play. Still, it is fun to see Satchmo on the screen. Really, the only musician I did not recognize was the most recent, a rapper named Kid Cudi. I have becoming familiar with his oeuvre all morning. Thanks for the tip Bill & Ted.

Like a lot of movies nowadays that derive from source material largely populated by white men, the movie has taken steps to get more people involved, perhaps even with the intention of handing off future installments to the girls Billie and Thea.  A lot of time I find this sort of inclusivity annoying because it seems to reflect not so much a moral imperative as much as a corporate bid to cater to the lowest common denominator in order to increase market share (the real money is in the international box office after all). It is almost axiomatic that most great movies are not inclusive (at least in terms of casting) because they concern specific subject matter and are thus intended for a specific audience. This adherence to particularity is what differentiates those movies from run-of-the-mill films which are designed to eschew controversy/personality in an effort to placate everyone. The usual result is that they resemble something you’ve seen a hundred times before because, spoiler alert, you have.

Here, though I give the inclusivity a pass. Given the personalities of Bill & Ted and the overall tone of the trilogy, uniting the world in song actually does seem to be in line with how the characters would act and where the plot would end up without undue contrivance. It would then make story sense to get everyone involved. The song could have been better, but you know, it is hard to create a transcendent piece of music that involves every musical style in the whole world going backwards and forwards through time. As it is pointed out, the point is not that the song is the best song, but that everyone is playing it, which is a very Bill & Ted argument. They never have been particularly good musicians.