Bill & Ted Face the Music Review!

 Alright! Today I am reviewing the third movie in the Bill & Ted trilogy, Bill & Ted Face the Music. Bill & Ted started out as a 1989 highschool comedy + time travel. Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey came out in 1991 and was more or less average sequel material. 

Bill & Ted Face the Music is in a weird spot. It came out 29 years after the last one, so that's a pretty big time jump, and for the most part, it lives up to the expectations you would expect from a Bill & Ted movie - except one. 

This movie isn't funny at all. And that's not like, "It failed to be funny" unfunny, it's more like a drama than anything else. Like, I didn't laugh once during the entire movie. It has a completely different vibe from the first two Bill & Teds. It's serious, but still Bill & Ted. There's not really a way to describe it. 

Everything is still excellent, but less so.

The movie is about Bill and Ted and their attempts to write the song that will save reality. It used to be humanity, but now it's reality, so... it's kind of sad that in the past 30 years we went to saving reality being more believable than saving humanity. 

So I'm going to summarize the plot here, so if you care about whatever spoilers a Bill & Ted movie can have, skip ahead. 

But, Bill and Ted have spent the past 30 years trying to come up with that song, and now that they only have an hour to do it, are freaking out. They figure that the easiest way to make the song will be to go and steal it from their future selves, only to find that they still haven't written it, 2, 5, and then 47 years into the future, at which point they finally have the song.

However, they are killed by an emotionally unstable robot and sent to hell, where they reunite with the Grim Reaper. They find their children there as well, who, during a B-plot, started assembling a band composed of Louis Armstrong, Mozart, Hendrix, Ling Lun, and a caveman named Grom to play the song that will save reality.

They convince death to let them out of hell to play the song, but, twist, it is not Bill S. Preston and Ted Logan who will perform the song, but their daughters, Thea Preston and Billie Logan. And then the movie abruptly ends. 

It's nice to have Death back.

It's a totally fine plot, but there is literally no humor to be found in it (At least outside the first five minutes). The entire thing is about the reality-ending stakes and a possible breaking up between Bill and Ted and their respective wives. It's very serious but also lighthearted but also not funny. It's a very strange middle ground.

This is actually how I would describe the entire movie. A strange middle ground. It's not hilarious or memorable like the first one, it's just... a movie. A time travel movie. And, for the most part, it's on the better side of time travel movies. 

There weren't a lot of things I liked about the movie. One of the things I did like was Keanu Reeves, who is breathtaking in every scene he's in. Another thing I liked was their costumes. They found a way to give them Bill and Ted style costumes without having these middle-aged dudes wear the same outfits they did when they were 18. 

Was Bill's shirt designed to look like it has a sweat stain?

Some things I disliked about the movie were the visual effects. For the most part, the visual effects are fine but nothing special, and occasionally fake looking. Another thing I disliked was how they had Jimi Hendrix, Mozart, and Louis Armstrong all together in the same movie and then did basically nothing with them. No personalities were displayed via the destruction of a mall.

I also wasn't a fan of their daughters. For the most part, they're doing impressions of the Bill and Ted from the '89 flick. It's really, really weird considering how they should have grown up in the 2000/2010s, not the 80s. Something wrong happened there. 

I also wasn't a fan of Kid Cudi in the movie. He's portrayed as such a smart and likable guy that at some point I wondered if Orion Pictures paid him to be in the movie or if he paid Orion Pictures to be in the movie. 

Every moment involving these three was strange.

And the last thing I wasn't a fan of was the ending. They play the song and then the entire movie just ends. None of that falling action stuff is present here. It cuts off as soon as the climax finishes, which is very jarring, to say the least. 

But most of my nitpicks are very minor things. Bill & Ted Face the Music is basically the sour cream of a movie. It's not doing anything special, but it's not actively hurting you either. It's just living on as a neat continuation of the story with a bit of enjoyment to be found. 

Overall, I give this movie a 6/10. "Bill & Ted Face the Music is good - but not excellent."

Regardless, be excellent to each other and party on, dudes.