Bill and Ted Face the Music

Bill and Ted Face the Music was an interesting experience for me, as I realized it was the first I’ve seen that has come out in 2020. For this to happen this late is a strange feeling. And, although I wasn’t in a theater, a mindless and fun blockbuster like this is exactly what we need. As a fan of the original Bill and Ted movie, I was admittedly worried about this one. I thought the trailers looked extremely unfunny, and it did nothing for my interest. I was pleasantly surprised when I found that I actually enjoyed it a lot, and while it lacked a lot of substance, it offered enough fun callbacks and quirky characters to make it worth the watch. Overall, that’s most of what I can say. It’s extremely hard to dissect a movie like this. It’s entire point of existence is to be this stupid.

That being said, sometimes it was just a little too stupid. A lot of the jokes didn’t land for me because of the messy plot. In fact, the plot is just all over the place. I understood what was happening, but no scene lasted longer than a minute, which often made it difficult to follow things. One big example of the consequences of this is the treatment of Bill and Ted from the future. I thought the idea was fun, but I just couldn’t care about it at all because of how often those characters changed. Sadly, at times, this is the same with the normal timeline Bill and Ted themselves. Both actors gave fine performances, but I felt they never truly had the same connection the two did in the original. I felt that if this movie was made 20 years ago, it would have felt exactly the same. Because there is no evolution of these characters from when we last saw them. And I understand that they are caricatures in a sense, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t have depth. Part of my feeling for this might just be the writing of their sub-plot. Of all of the stories woven together here, this one had the most time spent on it, and I felt that wasn’t quite necessary. On the other side of things, there are Bill and Ted’s daughters, Billie and Thea. I honestly really liked the dynamic of these two characters, even though it was a carbon copy of the original Bill and Ted. But, both actresses gave some good performances and brought life to the roles. If the entire movie was about those two meeting the music icons, I think the movie could have been even better.

Overall, while I thought the movie was incredibly fun, it was just incredibly mediocre. It isn’t a movie that I’m going to remember all that much, but I would watch it again, just not all too soon. 6.8/10