Bill & Ted Face the Music

A sharp-eyed view­er can always tell when the cin­e­matog­ra­phy has been gamed to obscure an actor’s age. Whether it’s the smeary soft-focus lens­ing or the pan­cake appli­ca­tion of wrin­kle-smooth­ing make­up or Scors­esian CGI wiz­ardry, it nev­er looks quite right. These tech­niques usu­al­ly yield the oppo­site of their intend­ed effect, draw­ing more atten­tion to the rav­ages of time and cre­at­ing the impres­sion of futile youth-clinging.

Cred­it to the cast and crew of Bill & Ted Face the Music, for grace­ful­ly matur­ing with­out relin­quish­ing the juve­nile spir­it that pop­u­larised the mem­bers of Wyld Stal­lyns. This sequel to Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter’s sci-fi/­com­e­dy fran­chise arrives near­ly three decades after the last instal­ment, and the script from Chris Math­e­son and Ed Solomon evinces a self-aware­ness of how this all looks. Name­ly: old.

Crisp ambi­ent white light­ing and hi-def dig­i­tal shoot­ing make every line on Theodore Logan and William Preston’s faces pop, their crag­gi­er vis­ages in sharp con­trast with their unchanged, ado­les­cent body lan­guage and speech. A less­er film would fight the inevitable; this one accepts it with a tran­quil­i­ty that can be described only as Keanuesque, and con­cludes that age needn’t stop any­one from par­ty­ing on.

With­out explic­it­ly dip­ping into the meta, the set-up bring­ing Bill and Ted back togeth­er cap­i­talis­es on the feel­ing that this prop­er­ty may have got­ten long in the tooth, turn­ing the air of des­per­a­tion the enter­prise could’ve had into part of the joke. After shred­ding with Death and sav­ing the world, the guys from San Dimas slow­ly fell out of favour with the pub­lic. Increas­ing­ly eager to be liked, they kept releas­ing albums to dimin­ish­ing returns, a force-the-love phi­los­o­phy that also extends to their rela­tion­ships with their wives (Erinn Hayes and Jay­ma Mays).

A cou­ples ther­a­py scene involv­ing both pairs of spous­es hits the Step Broth­ers high of pure absurd bliss, kin­dred man-chil­dren redeemed by their guile­less pos­i­tiv­i­ty. After all these years, their infec­tious upbeat atti­tude has only grown more endear­ing for its jux­ta­po­si­tion with mid­dle age.

The fate of all cre­ation falls to them once again, as an emis­sary from the future (Kris­ten Schaal, por­tray­ing the daugh­ter of the late George Carlin’s char­ac­ter) comes with a warn­ing that only the most epic Preston/​Logan tune of all time can save the uni­verse as we know it. So begins a con­vo­lut­ed – on pur­pose, most­ly – quest through time on mul­ti­ple fronts, as Bill and Ted try to get the per­fect song from their future-selves who have osten­si­bly already writ­ten it, while their daugh­ters Wil­helmi­na and Theodo­ra (Brigette Lundy-Paine and Sama­ra Weav­ing, respec­tive­ly) help out by assem­bling the great­est super­group his­to­ry has ever known.

It’s a lot of plot for 85-odd min­utes, and that’s not even account­ing for the neu­rot­ic robot Den­nis Caleb McCoy or Kid Cudi’s appear­ance as him­self, plus quan­tum physics exper­tise. But it all fits, breezed through with a lark­ish refusal to take any of it too seriously.

The only thing that real­ly counts in this series is music and its pow­er to uni­fy across place and era, the essence of their mantra to ​“be excel­lent to each oth­er.” A notion of rock ​’n’ roll that now seems obso­lete, replete with tasty licks and fin­ger-break­ing ham­mer-ons, has nev­er gone out of style for our good boys even if the world has left gui­tar music behind.

This film makes us see it their way, com­pelling us to believe in con­cepts like ​“being true to your­self,” which would oth­er­wise be unbear­ably corny. Bill and Ted’s stead­fast affa­bil­i­ty brings an earnest­ness to their part­ing pearls of wis­dom, and for a moment, being excel­lent looks like the most worth­while human aspi­ra­tion there is. Noth­ing bogus about that.