Released just shy of three decades since the last installment, Bill & Ted Face the Music is exactly the sort of legacy sequel that every old movie franchise has felt compelled to roll out in recent years, typically to mixed success. The very few smash hits that rekindle the original phenomenon are usually followed by other attempts that decidedly don’t.
The Bill & Ted franchise is further burdened by the facts that: 1) the entire story premise is rooted in the idea of its title characters being dumb teenagers, and 2) the previous sequel kind of stunk and killed anyone’s interest in watching more adventures from these two doofuses. Nevertheless, the characters still engendered plenty of sentimental good will from both fans and the actors famous for playing them. You can tell just from watching that Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter love these guys and were happy to slip back into their shoes for one more go-round. How could anyone fault them for that?
| Title: | Bill & Ted Face the Music |
| Year of Release: | 2020 |
| Director: | Dean Parisot |
| Watched On: | 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray |
| Also Available On: | Blu-ray MGM+ PlutoTV Tubi Various VOD rental and purchase platforms |
I’ll state up front that Face the Music isn’t nearly as fresh, ingenious, or frankly good as the original Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. However, it is much better than Bogus Journey, and that counts for quite a bit.
The plot this time out places the fate of all reality at stake when middle-aged Bill and Ted’s decades-long inability to write the perfect song causes the universe to “fold in on itself,” creating chaos throughout every time period. Rufus’ daughter (Kristen Schaal) comes calling and brings the boys to a future much less enthralled with them than the last time they visited. Given a deadline of just 77 minutes to fix all of time and space, the pair go on another time-hopping journey in a desperate, misguided ploy to obtain the song from some future versions of themselves who’ve already written it. Meanwhile, their daughters Billie and Thea (Samara Weaving and Jack Haven) have a separate adventure of their own trying to assemble the most bodacious backup band from some of history’s and the universe’s greatest musicians.
All in all, that’s not a bad concept for a belated sequel, even if it’s a bit repetitive of things already done in the first two movies. Unfortunately, the third film makes a lot of questionable choices for the sake of fan-service, the biggest of which (in my opinion) is to present the characters just about exactly the same as they were the last time we saw them as teenagers. Despite being thirty years older, married, and having kids of their own, Bill and Ted have learned precisely nothing, behave the same as they always did, and still speak almost exclusively in 1980s Valley slang. While I wouldn’t want the characters to change so much they’re unrecognizable, we’re given no evidence that they’ve grown or evolved at all during the time that has passed.
To be fair, that stagnation is built into the script as a story point, to explain why Bill and Ted failed to live up to the prophecy of becoming great artists critical to humanity’s future. I recognize that this is a deliberate decision by the screenwriters, even as I continue to find it disappointing.
I’m also not at all on-board with the idea that Bill and Ted’s daughters are basically gender-swapped clones of their dads, who speak the same, act the same, and share 100% the same taste in music and pop-culture references, with no thoughts or feelings of their own, or generational divisions at all. That’s a very lazy joke. Any real parent can tell you that children simply don’t work that way.
Those problems aside – and they’re not insignificant – Bill & Ted Face the Music thankfully has a number of legitimately funny gags and a lot of heart. The film ultimately pulls together to send the entire trilogy out on a good note that finally answers the nagging question of how any song, no matter how good (or not) could unite the world in transcendent harmony. Early on, Bill and Ted are explicitly told: “Sometimes things don’t make sense until the end of the story.” Just when you think it’s going nowhere, the movie reveals that it’s actually been cleverly structured to pay off on that message. That’s a very tough trick to pull off.
The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Bill & Ted Face the Music first came to Blu-ray in late 2020, on a disc from Warner Bros. (distributing for MGM). In 2024, Shout! Factory licensed the film for a Blu-ray reissue as well as an upgrade to 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray. The latter was sold either individually or as part of a Bill & Ted’s Most Triumphant Trilogy box set.
With another new director at the helm, the third movie returns the series to a wide aspect ratio of 2.39:1, similar to the original. However, this entry was photographed digitally rather than on film, and very much looks it. Stylistically, Face the Music doesn’t much resemble either of its predecessors. The movie has a sharp picture with good color, contrast, and HDR, but also a rather cold and clinical appearance that, combined with some of the dodgy CGI, often makes it feel more like a TV production than a feature film.
On the other hand, the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack has strong musical fidelity and some hard-hitting bass.
Bonus features are almost embarrassingly slight. The most substantive item in the supplement package is a 43-minute Comic-Con panel hosted by Kevin Smith over a Zoom conference during the height of the pandemic. Beyond that, all we get are a handful of EPK videos that can’t even rightly be called “featurettes” as none of them lasts longer than one minute.
Related
- Bill & Ted franchise
- Keanu Reeves
- Samara Weaving
- Dean Parisot (director)
- Ed Solomon (writer)
- Time Travel Adventure
Note: All screenshots on this page were taken from the standard Blu-ray edition of the film and are used for illustration purposes only.
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