Bill and Ted have faced the music, and thankfully they finally came to understand just why it was that they weren’t able to think up the song that would unify the world, but as anyone that’s already seen the movie can tell, it came in one of the most convoluted and insane ways that a person could imagine. If you were expecting a glowing review then you might need to go elsewhere, since despite being a movie that’s filled with feeling and a great deal of closure and understanding, Bill and Ted Face the Music was as cornball as the original movie but in some of the best ways. The beginning actually sees Ted’s younger brother Deacon marrying his and Bill’s former classmate and mother figure, Missy, with Ted’s dad in attendance at the wedding no less. Even worse, the two feel the need to rattle off Missy’s movements from high school up until the present moment, which is cringe-worthy at best and enough to make some folks think “okay, let’s move it along”. After that comes a wedding song that is nothing short of ‘wow’ and ‘what is this?’. The original movie might have been dumbed down a great deal, but it was entertaining and managed to make people laugh since the Wyld Stallyns were a couple of young goofballs that had no clue what to do with their lives, but still had a touch of destiny about them that was hard to miss.
Trying to recreate this feeling with two over the hill individuals that had done almost nothing with their lives over the past few decades just didn’t feel quite as funny since it might have struck a chord with a lot of people, making them wonder what they’d done with their lives and why they weren’t where they wanted to be. But that’s a simplistic, selfish, and ridiculous notion. The reason it’s not quite as funny but is definitely more packed with feeling is that the guys now have daughters that idolize them and want to help their careers in any possible way they can. When the two of them are tasked with coming up with the song that would unite the world, their time-traveling antics begin again as they try to step into the future to take the song from themselves, thinking to go the easy route and that they might have at one point developed the song without knowing it. Of course, this backfires, but thankfully their daughters travel through time as well and start to gather what would likely be the ultimate super band as they pick up Jimi Hendrix, Louis Armstrong, or Satchmo as some know him, as well as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and a few other faces that manage to create a powerful and enchanting sound that can help unify the world.
Even Death is back as one of the band members in this movie, and the idea of getting the band back together, or just together in the first place, and even providing instruments to the rest of the world so that they can play along, is kind of cool, but the impracticality of it is something that a lot of moviegoers might look at and say ‘what?’. The nature of the movie is to be as goofy as possible and to entertain the audience, but at the same time, this movie goes above and beyond with the cheesy lines and scenes, even when compared to the original. It’s almost as though the writers and the director, no offense, were attempting to create something that would get the necessary attention and overpower everyone with emotion. Unfortunately, while there is plenty of emotion and deep-seated feeling, a lot of it comes from nostalgia and not genuine interest. It’s unfortunate that George Carlin couldn’t have been a part of the movie, as it does feel as if his presence could have helped out quite a bit. But it’s also a good idea that they abstained from using his CGI presence, as just thinking about it makes one realize that it might have been a bit insulting to the original movie and Carlin’s memory.
As I said, if you were looking for a glowing review then you might need to go somewhere else because quite honestly the cringe and the cornball antics in this movie felt a bit overplayed at times, and it’s no use saying ‘no offense’ but I’m willing to call Kevin Smith a crybaby on this one since the ending wasn’t a tearjerker. To each their own and all that, but while I won’t call this movie a flop, since I did enjoy it, for the most part, I won’t call it the next best thing to the original, since the original is miles above this current installment. It was a fun movie, but two aging rockers that haven’t done anything with their lives is kind of hard to get into.
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