Welcome to this week’s edition of the Nerd Review!  Every week the Nerds give you their take on a different movie from the Nerdosphere.  This week Dave and Patrick review 2020’s Bill and Ted Face The Music!

The Flick:  Bill and Ted Face The Music

What’s it About:  Thirty years have passed since Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted Theodore Logan formed the band Wyld Stallyns and brought peace to the future.  Or so they thought.  When they are visited from the future by the daughter of their future friend Rufus, they learn things have not worked out as prophesied.  Can they find the key to saving the world before the future give up on their last hope?

Metacritic Score: 65

The Nerds’ Take on Bill and Ted Face The Music (2020):

Patrick:  When I finally came around to watching Bill and Ted Face the Music, my expectations were considerably low.  Neither of the previous Bill and Ted films were what one would consider highbrow.  But they were both thoroughly enjoyable to watch and a breezy way to spend an hour and a half.  I was really concerned that this third effort some thirty years after Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, would be heavy on nostalgia and light on laughs.  I was really wrong here.  Not only is Bill and Ted Face the Music a fun, heartwarming love letter to music as well as a cute story of family unity.  It may be *whispers* better than Bogus Journey.

The film take place thirty year after the event of Bogus Journey.  Bill and Ted appeared destined for musical greatness having just formed the band that will write the song that saves the world.  Unfortunately, we learn through a montage that success did not follow our heroes.  Instead, the band breaks up and Bill and Ted are trying to make it on their own.  Both Bill and Ted are now married and fathers of daughters who share their love for all things music.  The boy are till trying to make music, but they find themselves reduced to playing sad little gigs, like Ted’s brother’s wedding.  Meanwhile the all of time and space is unravelling because the great song to bring harmony to the world is not being written, and may never be written.  In a last ditch attempt to fix things, the great leaders once again gather Bill and Ted to the future and attempt to help them write their song.  Bill and Ted panic when they can’t come up with anything and so go back in time to find their future selves and steal the song after it has been written.

There are two other subplots weaved in the main narrative.  First, Bill and Ted’s daughters go on their own mission to help their dads by gathering great musicians throughout time to find a super band in a nod to the original film.  The second is Bill and Ted trying to salvage their marriages to the princesses.  Relationships that have been falling apart because the guys see the quartet as one big couple as opposed to individual couples.  All in all there is enough here to allow for an enjoyable story that feels familiar, yet is unique all its own.

I found this movie to be more than a little amusing.  Bill and Ted trying to outsmart themselves throughout time really got me going.  As you follow the guys on their journey, you discover along with them that they’re really frauds, reaching a particularly funny low point where their future selves steal a song from Dave Grohl and try to pass it off as the song to save the world.  Meanwhile, the daughters quest while secondary serves as fun throwback to the first film and has some amusing moments, especially when they recruit Mozart to the cause.  The brand of humor hasn’t changed and that’s a good thing.  It really kept the charm of the original two.  Bill and Ted are dumb, but sweet.  The audience pulls for them because they just try so dang hard to pull off this huge responsibility.

The cast put together for Face the Music is terrific for the most part.  Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves revive their roles as Bill and Ted.  They seamlessly slide right back into their classic speech patterns and mannerisms that thousands of kids from the late 80s and early 90s emulated.  Another return that will please fans is that of William Sadler returning to the character of Death.  Sadler stole the show in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, and his return to the franchise was a welcome addition.  The only performance I didn’t care for came from Brigette Lundy-Payne portraying Ted’s daughter Billie.  She carried a similar look to a young Reeves, but she seemed too focused on imitating Reeves’ mannerisms and speech styles, that it grew quite distracting and hurt her performance.  Samara Weaving, on the other hand, does an admirable job as Bill’s daughter Thea.  The best performance for me though was put forth by Anthony Carrigan, playing desperate to be liked killer android Dennis Caleb McCoy.  Without revealing too much, Carrigan’s work literally steals the back half of the film in a good way.

Bill and Ted Face the Music wont’s change the face of comedy as we know it.  But I thought it was a fun ride.  The nostalgia of the characters and the brand of humor aren’t used too prop the film up too much.  The story is predictable, but cute.  The film was even amusing enough to hold the attention of one Mrs. O’Dowd.  And that woman brakes for no film.  That alone is enough for me to recommend this movie.  So sit back for a couple of hours, turn off your brains, and enjoy some music.  Future you wants you to.

Patrick’s Rating: 3.46/5.0

Dave The COVID-19 pandemic impacted all of our lives dramatically in 2020. Perhaps no industry felt that impact more than the entertainment industry. From an empty arena WrestleMania, to cinemas falling silent across the nation, to a whole slew of delayed and canceled projects, the global pandemic made entertainment its bitch for most of the year. Near the end of the year, Wonder Woman 1984 bucked the trend by being released on streaming services on Christmas Day. But, a few months earlier another sequel unexpectedly saw a similar release in theaters and on video services such as Vudu. Bill & Ted Face The Music came out on August 28, 2020. The third installment in the Bill & Ted series came out some 29 years after Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. As it would turn out, this huge gap in time between releases would not help matters and while I enjoyed this movie more the second time I watched it, it is still not quite what I had hoped for.

When last we saw Bill S. Preston, Esq. (I am still not sure what law school would have actually granted Bill admission, but I digress) and Ted “Theodore” Logan, they had conquered Death and made him their bass player, had married the princesses, had kids, and had created a masterpiece of a song that sounded an awful lot like Kiss’s God Gave Rock N Roll To You. That was the song that was supposed to have created world peace and made the world a much better place. Now, it is 29 years later. As it turns out, a Kiss song was not enough to create everlasting peace and harmony. The guys have still not created their musical masterpiece and their repeated failings have not only threatened their respective marriages, but are also endangering reality as we know it. An intervention from Kelly, Rufus’s daughter, sets the guys upon their new quest: To create the song that they were prophesized to create before 7:17 PM that evening. If they fail, then reality would collapse in on itself and, in essence, time and space would cease to exist. Kelly has the utmost faith in the guys; her mother, The Grand Leader, thinks that the only way to save reality is through the death of Bill & Ted so she sends a robot named Dennis to kill the guys.

Meanwhile, Bill & Ted’s daughters, Billie & Thea, recognize Kelly as being from the future. They speak with her and decide to help their dads out. The girls channel much of the charm of the original Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure by travelling through time and collecting historical musicians to create a band to help their dads write the ultimate song. This includes Jimi Hendrix, Louie Armstrong, and Mozart. Bill & Ted also take a time-traveling approach to solving this problem as they travel progressively further into the future to obtain “the song” from their future selves. This leads to some very funny interactions between the guys and their future selves, especially the roided out versions of Bill & Ted, who are doing time for breaking into Dave Grohl’s home a few years earlier. In the end, Dennis kills everyone, everyone ends up in Hell, the guys reconcile and reunite with Death, he resurrects everyone, and, with a mammoth assist from their daughters, the guys finally succeed in creating the song that their lives have revolved around for three movies and three decades.

This is a fun movie in many places. Let me say this: I love the daughters Billie and Thea. They carry their father’s love of music and their whole “Be Excellent To Each Other” mentality. But they are much more sophisticated, smart, and resourceful then their dads ever were. As much as I love Bill & Ted, it is the girls who steal the show here. As for Bill & Ted themselves, I loved seeing Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves reprise these iconic roles. However, Keanu just did not look right in this movie. Something just seemed off there. I am not sure whether this was intentional or not but it was noticeable. Alex Winter was a different story and that might be because we have not seen nearly as much of him over the years as we have of Keanu.

This brings me to an issue I had that I could not reconcile. Since Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, we have seen Keanu Reeves tackle roles such as Neo in The Matrix, John Constantine, a conflicted lawyer in The Devil’s Advocate, Jack Traven in Speed, and most recently he has done a phenomenal job in portraying John Wick. When Bill & Ted were at their apex, it was easy to accept Keanu as the lovable Ted “Theodore” Logan. Now… and I cannot believe I am saying this… it seems that Keanu is almost too established of an actor to play Ted any longer. That is not to say he was not excellent in this movie because he was. It is just that there is a disconnect there that was surprising to experience.

Bill & Ted Face The Music is the living embodiment of the premise that you can’t always go home again. There is absolutely nothing really wrong with the movie. It is nowhere close to as good as Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, nor would I say it was as good as Bogus Journey either. It is just not as fun or funny as those movies were, even though there are numerous funny parts to be found here. It really tries to recapture the magic of the first two movies by having us revisit various aspects of the first two films that we loved, such as Bill & Ted interacting with various incarnations of themselves, the girls time traveling exploits to obtain historical musicians, the trip to the afterlife, and so forth. This is, unfortunately, a hit and miss venture. A big miss was the killer robot, Dennis. I found nothing interesting or endearing about this character and he was more of an annoyance than something that added anything of substance to the movie. The climax of the movie felt a tad too rushed and simple and a bit too much of a rehash of the end of Bogus Journey that just fell flat.

However, if you were a fan of the first two movies, then I have to recommend that you check this one out. The long gap in time between the second and third movies definitely did not help things as, in many ways, Bill & Ted’s schtick from the 90’s does not translate so well in 2021. I also have to note that George Carlin’s absence from this movie was clearly felt and a huge loss to try and overcome. But there is still enough of that Wyld Stallions charm here to make this worth your 90-minute time investment. I am probably going to rate this too high out of my love and respect for Bill & Ted but all I can really say is…Party On Dudes!

Dave’s Rating: 3.0/5

Overall Nerds’ Rating on Bill and Ted Face the Music (2020): 3.23/5.0