Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) **

 

There are 80's teen movies that have aged well (1985's “Back to the Future” comes to mind.), and then there is “Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.” The movie was a sensation back in the day, with young people constantly quoting its catchphrases - “Excellent!” “Party on, Dude!” I honestly never sat down and watched the entire movie back then, but you would have had to live under a rock to have missed its influence. Watching it now, I think that the kindest thing that can be said is that it is very of its time.

The film is about a couple of Valley Boys. Bill (Alex Winters) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) are a pair of lovable goofballs who are too busy fantasizing about being big rock stars to actually learn music, let alone study for school. Despite their slacker ways, we learn that these guys are destined to become the greatest musicians and thinkers of all time, upon whose music a future, Utopian society will be based. That won't happen if they flunk out of school, however, so that future society sends a guy named Rufus (George Carlin) back in time to ensure that they pass. (This is NOT one of those movies that thinks deeply about time travel.) Rufus lends the boys a time-traveling phone booth (apologies to “Dr. Who”), and they skip through the centuries, kidnapping historical figures to speak in their history presentation.

It's all as dumb as it sounds, which is saying a lot, and which was not inevitable. Plenty of movies with sillier premises than this have managed to have an underlying intelligence and wit. When “Bill & Ted” manages to be funny, it's the funny of a public fart, and I don't mean the unexpected fart from your uptight, high school principal, followed by an awkward silence. This film is more like when the class clown rips one for the hundredth time.

Whatever I think of it now, the movie was a hit back in the day. The kids loved it! It also unleashed Keanu Reeves on the world. This wasn't his first movie, but it's the one that made him a star, for better or for worse. His wooden acting would go on to pollute our screens for decades to come. One thing I'll say for “Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure” - Reeves is actually animated in this movie. He has spent most of his career looking and acting like he ate something that disagreed with him. In “Bill & Ted,” he's a loose-limbed, goofy-smiled, charming marionette.

As one of the few people in the Free World who didn't see the film when it came out, I'm in a unique position to reconsider it now, as I have no nostalgia for it. The question is, viewed on its own merits, should you watch it now? The answer is complicated by the release, all these years later, of a new Bill & Ted sequel, “Bill & Ted Face the Music,” which I have not seen. I would say that unless the new film gets some pretty stellar reviews, it would be safe to leave the whole franchise to ancient history.

2 stars out of 5