Review of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991) by Ben L — 09 Feb 2016

I feel like the writers of Bill & Ted were ambushed by the studio and told to make a sequel, and do it quick. This movie has the feeling of being slapped together by a committee who had no idea what to do with another movie and so they just threw out any wacky idea that popped into their heads.

Sadly most of those ideas are terrible. Like the one that made them decide that, instead of time travel, this film will focus on the after life. I'll admit that the Grim Reaper becomes (by far) the best character in this film, but the journeys through hell and heaven are lackluster at best.

Then there's the evil robots who are kind of funny because they still have the annoying personalities of their counterparts and therefore annoy their master, but the film made them so impossible to defeat that we had to endure the Station insanity.

Also I had one of my problems with the first film reappear here...Once again I have some serious difficulty caring about Bill & Ted because I don't find them to be likable characters, which becomes a problem because we have to endure 3 different versions of these lackluster characters.

But one of the oddest choices they made in this film was to change the future. In the first film we were given the impression that the future was basically perfect, but the catalyst for this movie is that there is a really bad element to the future, so maybe we don't want Bill & Ted saving it.

Not to mention the fact that they never address how messed up things in the future will still be, all they did was resolve stuff in the present. This movie has moments where I chuckle, but overall it's a mess and probably shouldn't have been made.

Props to William Sadler though for really nailing the one totally positive aspect of this film, I could watch a movie focused on his Grim Reaper any time.