Bill And Ted’s Bogus Journey
The Bill And Ted franchise which started with 1989’s Excellent Adventure remains amongst the most appealing of concepts: two idiot, dunderheaded teenagers with lame aspirations of being rock stars are in reality the ones whose future music career would change the whole world as we know it into a pleasantly positive utopia, albeit with the help of others time traveling from the future in order to give them a little nudge towards their predetermined destiny. Even more interesting was the sight of Keanu Reeves as Ted “Theodore” Logan (prior to becoming easily one of the biggest movie stars to ever live) seamlessly working alongside real life best friend Alex Winter as Bill S. Preston, Esq., even though in real life Winter would remain a fringe player on the Hollywood landscape when compared to Reeves’ almost overwhelming success. Excellent Adventure set the stage for everything with its two airhead heroes utilizing the marvels of time travel to meet and recruit various historical figures into late 80s Southern California to run roughshod using their various historical talents (and to help our heroes pass their history exam so that they can continue towards their destiny). This 1991 sequel (originally called Bill And Ted Go To Hell but changed over use of the H word in the title) reunited Reeves and Winter once again (along with several other returning players including George Carlin as futuristic guidance counselor Rufus) and smartly scaled back the time travel aspects to send Bill and Ted on another epic journey, this time to the afterlife which includes the expected stops in Heaven and Hell before returning to Earth and literally coming back from the dead to once again continue their march to destiny. The reason? A dictator like figure from the future (Joss Ackland, who later admitted to hating the movie) complete with his head being constantly illuminated by the inner lights on the neck of his costume is leading a revolution against the light hearted and free spirited society which our heroes had created by using the established time travel technology to send back two preprogrammed evil lookalike cyborgs of Bill and Ted to murder the original duo and then muck up any chance of them ever making it to the top after taking their place. And kill them they do, sending Bill and Ted into the afterlife and introducing the element that helps this sequel break away and stand out in its own right: in the tradition of the Lethal Weapon series, they added a third member to the team who can play off Bill and Ted’s moronic personalities for more laughs. The masterstroke was in making this third new major character be none other than the Grim Reaper himself (a.k.a. Death) played with a stoic hilarity by William Sadler (best known as the cold hearted villain Col. Stuart from Die Hard 2) in what starts off as a straight up spoof of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and then becomes something much more than that, with Death first losing to the duo at playing board games (as opposed to chess in Seventh Seal) which as stipulated not only compels him to bring Bill and Ted back to life, but to remain at their side all the way to the end where he winds up joining their band (Wyld Stallions) as their bass player (perhaps implying that much of Bill and Ted’s “influence” would result from there being less people in the world dying since Death is now hanging out with all of us). It’s a concept that works wonderfully with Sadler’s Reaper playing the insecure square next to the two lighthearted goofballs en route to taking down both the two evil cyborg doubles (also played by Reeves and Winter) and Ackland’s maniacal supervillain, a guy who had somehow resisted and overcome the carefree nature of his own time to try and alter future history to being a much more ordered structure. There’s a lot of energy and creative inspiration on hand here and certainly not everything works out well, including two alien “scientists” (recruited in Heaven) who are brought in to build two “good” Bill and Ted cyborgs to counteract the evil ones, an idea that turns out to not be as funny as it sounds. But in terms of advancing the ideas of the franchise as started in Excellent Adventure (now the two goofball dimwits are not only Messiah figures but also Christ figures as well), this follow up does an exemplary job of laying the groundwork (and during the end credits, using newspaper headlines to show their rise to power) of what was promised in Excellent Adventure along with bringing in a new character that shines just as brightly as the two original stars…
8/10