Yeah, I watched "Bill & Ted Face The Music" and it was... fine
I love Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (the latter of which goes into the “movies my dad took me to when I was probably way too young for it” category), so when Bill & Ted Face The Music came out last week (both in theatres and VOD), I obviously wanted to watch it. It was okay.
If I knew now what I’d known then, would I have spent $20 to rent it? Probably not. But would I have still rented it for like $5 in a couple of months? Maybe.
The plot to this one catches up to Bill & Ted, nearly 30 years after Bogus Journey — they still haven’t created the song that unites the world, and now all of reality and time is collapsing because of it. They have a limited amount of time to write and perform the song or all of reality will be destroyed.
My main issue is that Bill & Ted don’t seem to go on that much of a journey in this movie — all of their scenes involve them visiting future versions of themselves, hoping that they’ll eventually meet versions that have already written the song. Yes, it’s funny to see the different versions of the themselves telling current Bill & Ted just how much they fucked up their lives, but I wanted more of a wacky caper from them.
Also, I love me some Keanu, don’t get me wrong, but I feel like it’s been a long time since someone asked him to act goofy, and he’s not quite used to it. (He did comedy very well in Always Be My Maybe, but that was an exaggerated self-seriousness, not goofiness.) Still, it was very fun to watch him act against Alex Winters again.
I’m also irked, but not remotely surprised, by the casting of Jayma Mays and Erinn Hayes as Bill & Ted’s princess wives — the actresses are both about 10 to 15 years younger than Reeves and Winters, which is just typical Hollywood bullshit. Mays is 41 and Hayes is 44, even though the princesses were around Bill & Ted’s ages in 1991’s Bogus Journey. If the princesses are supposed to be the same ages as the actresses, that would have made them 12 and 15 in 1991, when they married Bill & Ted. But heaven forbid we actually cast age-appropriate actresses!!! Gross. The princesses get a bit of their own storyline in this, but it’s pretty much resolved off screen and feels tacked on.
That said, I loved the addition Bill & Ted’s daughters, Thea (Samara Weaving) and Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who love music and have the exact same speaking mannerisms as their fathers, but are also a lot smarter and go on their own journey to help their dads. I loved Weaving in Ready Or Not, and Lundy-Paine’s performance here is especially good. I can’t wait to see more of them in other stuff, and would even not hate a spin-off movie or TV show of their characters.
Also HUGE props to Anthony Carrigan (who you might know best as NoHo Hank on Barry) for playing Dennis Caleb McCoy, the terminator-esque robot tasked with killing Bill & Ted but who then grows a conscience. His scenes were the highlight of the film for me. Actually, add him to the daughters’ spinoff and I’m there.
It’s fairly easy to figure out how the movie’s going to end about partway through the film, but it’s still very nice when we get there. Like I said, this movie’s probably not worth $20, but wait a while and rent it for less, or wait a bit longer for it to land on one of the streaming services.
That’s all for me today, gorgeous! Talk to you soon.
Love,
Kat
If you know someone who might like this newsletter, please forward it to them! And if you enjoy my newsletter, click the button below and consider throwing some money in the tip jar. (In return, you’ll get some bonus content each month!)
You can follow me on Twitter here, and Instagram here. *All typos and other errors were included specifically to bother you.*