I Watch Films: Bill And Ted Face The Music

Bill And Ted Face The Music

Twenty five years later we get a third movie in the Bill And Ted series. And it’s not bad? Maybe it’s the nostalgia. Or the unironic hope, a comedy that isn’t mean spirited.

Bill and Ted have been trying to make the music that will unite the world for twenty five years and it hasn’t worked. Now they’re put on a deadline by the people of the future, as in seventy seven minutes* all of reality will be destroyed. Already people are popping in and out of history. Under pressure and unable to write a song, they head off through time to ask future versions of themselves about the song. This doesn’t go well.

Meanwhile their daughters are also going through time to pick up history’s greatest musicians in order to play the song when they write it. But some of the people from the future think that they need to kill Bill and Ted so send a time travelling robot to laser them to death.

Which is an interesting plot point as Death was the bass player in the band they put together in Bill And Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Anyway, maybe things will be okay if we can all get together and sing, and we should trust ourselves, and the mistakes we made are okay, and the kids might just save us. There’s something slightly old-fashioned and good-hearted and it’s a silly film that is slightly brighter and smarter than it needed to be.

Watch This: A surprisingly sweet stupid comedy
Don’t Watch This: You didn’t like it 25 years ago and it’s not changed.

* An understated joke is that this is also the amount of time that the film has to run until the big music-that-unites-everyone scene.