
Unfortunately, time has run out for Bill & Ted. Meanwhile, their kids Thea (Samara Weaving, “Ready or Not”) and Billie (Brigitte Lundy-Paine, “Bombshell”) are best friends and music aficionados of the highest order (not to mention very much their fathers’ daughters). Their wives – the princesses Joanna (Jayma Mays, TV’s “Drunk History”) and Elizabeth (Erinn Hayes, “Holly Slept Over”) – love them very much, though both are somewhat frustrated by the arrested development of their husbands. In the decades since, the two have been on a quest to fulfill the destiny laid upon them so long ago – a quest that has been largely futile.īill and Ted remain inseparable, living next door to one another in San Dimas with their respective families. However, it turns out that the song – while excellent and successful – was NOT the one that would unify the cosmos. It was 30 years ago that Bill (Alex Winter, “Showbiz Kids”) and Ted (Keanu Reeves, “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum”) played the song that would ostensibly be the one to put the universe in harmony and define the future. It is weird and hilarious and moving, sweetly and unapologetically strange. It’s about the frustration of having a path dictated for you and the disappointment when it proves too difficult to properly follow. It’s also a story of family and what it means to live up to a legacy, of how the next generation’s ideas about the world are impacted by those who came before, but not always bound by them. Reuniting Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves as the titular duo, the film captures the essence of what made these characters resonate 30 years ago while also allowing them to tell a different kind of story, a story of adulthood and the pressures of expectations and the challenges that come in a life that lacks balance … even as they remain in many ways the same amiably goofy dudes that they’ve always been. “Bill & Ted Face the Music” is just such a chapter. Note that I said “almost always,” because it is possible for one of these films to actually prove to be a worthwhile continuation, a new chapter that both expands upon and embraces the legacy of the movie or movies that came before. They are almost always bad ideas across the board, woeful misfires that fail to capture or even understand what made their predecessors so beloved in the first place. These movies continue stories on which the book had closed a decade or more in the past. One of the many unfortunate side effects of 21st century cinema’s affinity for franchises is the occasional appearance of the years-later sequel.
