Bill and Ted: Face the Music

Ten Second Review: There’s just enough here for fans of the series, but there could have been more. 

I feel as though you either love Bill and Ted or it’s really not your thing. I struggle to imagine kind of liking it. It’s very much an all in or all out style of filmmaking. My mum is clearly in the former camp as she couldn’t wait to show it to me when I was a kid. I literally couldn’t tell you how young I was when she first made me watch it, but fortunately for her I loved it too and we still watch it more often than maybe we should. When she was taken by surprise by the trailer for this reboot she sat there dumbstruck looking at me. Safe to say when tickets went live we booked them immediately. 

Bill and Ted still haven’t written the song that will unite the world and as time goes on they’re not sure they will. Just as they decide to stop so they can work on their marriages and set an example for their teenage daughters (Theodora and Billie) they get a new envoy from the future. Times up and they need the song it a little over an hour. The pair will have to travel in time to find the song from their future selves while their daughters help in the best way they can think to.

So there we are in cinema seats that we booked weeks in advance, in a screening that can’t have had more than 8 people total. Clearly this isn’t a seat filler, however, that doesn’t mean it can’t be great. 

It’s so so.

The thing is, most of the film I absolutely loved, its Bill and Ted (and their daughter counterparts) doing Bill and Ted things in a Bill and Ted way. When the film is doing that it’s generally doing quite well. The problem is that at some point it has to wrap up and with a less firm end goal than their initial excellent adventure, the landing is harder to stick.

Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves are as amusing as ever (although Keanu feels as though he is elsewhere at some points), and the overall plot is about what you’d expect. The weird problem that develops is that their daughters, played excellently by Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy Paine, quickly develop into the most enigmatic characters and this is one of the few reboots I’ve seen where it was crying for an in film hand off to a younger generation. 

Instead of an A storyline following Bill and Ted Senior and a B storyline falling Bill and Ted Junior, they should have switched. We could have still got a few classic references on a much less developed version of Reeves and Winter’s narrative, but their younger counterparts were clearly the choice to lead and here it really would have worked and relivened the series a little. 

I think that going too deep into the film’s faults wouldn’t serve this review too well. There are things to enjoy here and fans of the series will most likely enjoy those parts. I doubt new viewers will find much to engage with and there certainly were options to build a new story for the characters rather than toe the line of nearly handing off the reigns but not quite committing. 

I’m not angry, I enjoyed much of my time in my empty screening giggling with my mum, I’m just a little disappointed that it came so close but missed hitting the mark as well as it could have. It was more like it glanced off the target rather than hit the bullseye. I guess I should be glad it hit the target at all considering how some of these reboots have gone.