Review of Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020) by Viroodiem — 30 Aug 2020

Too much time in the grave to try and bring back from the dead.

While the performances were pretty decent,Samara Weaving Brigette Lundy-Paine do a most outstanding job imitating Reeves & Winter but do nothing to make anything but genderToo much time in the grave to try and bring back from the dead.

While the performances were pretty decent,Samara Weaving.

Brigette Lundy-Paine do a most outstanding job imitating Reeves & Winter but do nothing to make anything but gender swapped imitations. Winter * Reeves both do a solid job reprising their roles and bringing something new to their characters with their age. Again overall the acting on its own was very solid, its just the writing was horrendous. The writing was terrible and given the benchmark of Bill & Ted franchise that is a bar so low you could trip over it. The "humor" was so dull, bland and inoffensive that its hard to suggest there was any comedy in it at all. I found two chuckles and they definitely were not at intended "jokes". The script completely missed the goofy humor from the first two and mostly just merged the main plot of 1&2 into a weird copypasta abomination.

I grew up with the original two films. I enjoyed them greatly and they stood in their place in the late late 80s and early 90s.

While media must evolve through time and story telling today is far different than it was 30 years ago, there is so much change that it illustrates all but the broad strokes of B&T were either forgotten or the writers were oblivious to. Most likely being from a period before many of the key writers being born.

Absent from this comedy movie about metalheads is... well.. metal. The soundtrack is proof of this. B&T1 soundtrack were roughly approximate to lighter mainstream metal in their representative time. Featured on both were acts like Faith No More, Megadeth, Warrant, Extreme and even KISS. B&T3 is basically devoid of not only mainstream modern or even 80-90s musicians, but of known artists at all. The soundtrack is pretty much just studio professionals akin to but not up to the level of Two Steps From H ell. Honestly for all the love this was supposed to be showing to metal from days gone by, the music comes off more like terrible "World" music. There is no anthem to be found here and all the songs are regrettably forgettable.

All in all I WANT to like the film but it was bland, boring, missing the point of the source material and going out of its way to ignore inspiration from it. It is just a retread of 1&2 mangled together into a butchered beast that is only concerned with trolling out nostalgic highlights and plodding its way through the mangled together patchwork plots of 1&2. It plays off more like a desperate payday to get Alex Winter in front of the camera instead of directing things nobody has heard of than a true successor to Bill & Ted.

One kudos I will give the film is that they resisted the urge to totally desecrate George Carlin's Rufus with age regression CGI & using a stand in actor and kept it to existing footage and manipulating existing audio tracks. Though they did WANT to.

2 is too low but 3 is way too kind. 2.65 from me. Not a true 3 but rounding up given the noble attempt by the actors to work out something with no script to work with that was clearly rushed and could have benefited from C19 giving them time to polish the whole project instead of trying to brute force a dud through.