If you’re in the mood to still see the world saved from armageddon and would rather not look out your window or have the patience to understand the nature of time in Tenet‘s apocalyptic events, Bill & Ted Face the Music is your solution.
It’s been over two decades since we last saw Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves). Now the time has finally come for the Wyld Stallyns to unite the world with the most excellent, bodacious song at 7:17 p.m. to be exact.
The only issue, through all these years, the only thing that has changed for Bill and Ted is marrying the time-traveling princesses, and their raising daughters Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and Thea (Samara Weaving) to follow in their ways as classic rock fanatics with endless hope in humanity and devotion to each other.
Not even Bill’s brother Deacon (Beck Bennett) marrying their former step-mom and high school classmate Missy (Amy Stoch) can trip them up. They find it rather amusing that this now makes Ted’s dad his own son now. And on top of that, the Wyld Stallyns can debut their new song that the hope is the song that fulfills their destiny to save the world as Rufus (George Carlin) ordained.
Yet, rather than save the world, their train wreck of a song leads to an even more disastrous couples therapy session that confirms Bill and Ted’s shared, adolescent identity as their most dire problem.
It’s not until Rufus’ daughter Kelly (Kristen Schaal) appears later in which time begins to unfold, and Bill and Ted are brought to the Great Leader in the future to help preserve time and space with little over an hour remaining. And in true Bill and Ted fashion, they look to take the easy route by using the time traveling phone booth to steal the song from themselves in the future, convinced they wrote it at some point.
In this whole time-hopping journey, we’re introduced to all sorts of parallel versions of the two. Some versions are welcoming, others like the meathead jailbirds or the ones with British accents are less inviting versions that hate their former selves. It’s strange to even see such emotion come out of these two iconic characters, but it makes for an interesting dynamic that hadn’t been seen since the robot versions were sent back in time to kill prime Bill and prime Ted in Bogus Journey.
Speaking of which, Death (William Sadler) is brought back and reunites with his Wyld Stallyn buddies after virtually the entire cast is sent to hell — even a grateful, emotionally unstable, scene-stealing robot named Dennis (Anthony Carrigan) following a time-traveling scheme with Billie and Thea.
This all makes for a most excellent experience. Even the adolescent nature of the titular characters does wonders here despite Winter and Reeves being almost 30 years too old to act like high schoolers. To that rate, that very DNA is perfectly copied by Lundy-Paine and Weaving, best showcased in a solo scene with Death that feels exactly like his first encounter in hell with their fathers.
Right down to the final scene, Bill & Ted Face the Music feels the same and new all at once. We couldn’t have asked for more.
