Bill & Ted Face The Music review: Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter bend time on a mostly excellent mission to save reality

It’s a tale as old as time: two somewhat unfocused pals try to unite the world via a cultural artefact and, instead of buckling under the pressure, succeed. Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, the best friends who wrote the screenplays for sci-fi comedies Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, penned this threequel. They’ve been fretting over it for almost a decade, and though much of the dialogue is scatter-shot and lazy, it barely matters. Dean Parisot’s film, already going great guns in the US, has an excellent third act and a final montage that’s so non-bogus it made me shed tears.

Most Brits know something about Californian slackers Bill and Ted (Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves). Even clueless non-fans are familiar with the catchphrases. My dad assumed the whole thing was a Fast Show spin-off (“They’ve made a film about Ralph and Ted? That’s nice!”) Having been put straight, he sighed, “O, THOSE two. Most rubbish!”

Anyway, Bill and Ted, now middle-aged, married suburbanites, have spawned twentysomethings, Thea and Billie (Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-Paine), who are also music-mad layabouts, but somewhat less berk-ish.

In the new film, dads and daughters approach the same mission from a different angle. Bill and Ted have been trying, for years, to write a song that will put everyone on the same page. Now they learn they have 78 minutes to do so or reality will unravel. Of course. Quick-thinking Thea and Billie go back in time to form a super-group that includes Jimi Hendrix and a cavewoman. Meanwhile, Bill and Ted put their efforts into stealing the “perfect song” from their future selves.

Reeves has always inspired lust and his career resurgence, post-John Wick, suggests he is still viewed as hot stuff. To be honest, as present-day Ted, he’s resistible (it’s something about his lanky dark hair, which sits oddly against his vaguely frozen face; as he galumphs around, he could be a lead-booted version of the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang). His future selves, whether naughty or nice, are more appealing. Ironically, it’s when he’s allowed to look debauched and decrepit that his gorgeousness shines through.

Weaving and Lundy-Paine are totally delightful, somehow convincing as chilled youngsters who take no drugs. Though squeaky clean, they never come across as Disney Channel-esque moppets. It was an especially smart move to cast the non-binary Lundy-Paine as Billie. Thanks to the hair/make-up/costume department, the latter resembles cool and crafty rock icon, King Princess.

Best of all though is William Sadler’s Death. First seen in Bogus Journey, this neurotic grim reaper has a Czech accent, defiantly forlorn body-language, plays bass like a man who’s listened to a lot of Pixies and is a fount of wisdom (“tambourine is not as easy as it looks”). The plot gains momentum from the second Death shows up. As time starts to fly, words heard early on (“Sometimes things don’t make sense until the end of the story”) prove entirely prophetic.

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