Bill & Ted Face The Music review: Laugh-out-loud funny at times, and thin and slow at others

Bill & Ted Face The Music                                                      Cert: PG, 1hr 31mins

Rating:

The Broken Hearts Gallery                                                Cert: 12A, 1hr 48mins

Rating:

The enduring appeal of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure – released way back in 1989 – hangs on three things. First, there’s the engaging silliness of the story – two sweet but dim Californian teenagers are lent a time-travelling phone box that enables them to graduate from high school and write a song that saves humanity. 

Then there’s the touchingly unconditional friendship between said Ted (Keanu Reeves) and Bill (Alex Winter) and the sheer puppy-dog appeal of Reeves’s enthusiastically convincing portrayal of a teenager when he was actually 24.

Actually, there’s a fourth, because we cannot forget their love of language. Bill and Ted may not be the brightest pair in San Dimas but they love to litter a sentence with the likes of ‘heinous’, ‘egregious’ and ‘counter-intuitive’, not to mention more streetwise offerings such as ‘bodacious’, ‘bogus’ and, of course, ‘dude’. 

All four factors come enjoyably into play as real-life friends Reeves and Winter reunite for their long-awaited third outing, a mere 29 years after their second in Bogus Journey. 

Which I mention because Death is back in this one too. And still wielding a mean bass guitar.

Which is more than can be said for our shaggy-haired heroes. More than quarter of a century on, and with even Reeves finally having the grace to look older, they still haven’t written the song that saves the future. 

So another time-traveller – daughter of the original Rufus – is sent back to tell them to get a move on, because this time the very future of time and space hangs on it too.

Cue more phone-box time-travelling, both by our ageing duo as they try to steal the song from their future selves, and by their similarly music-mad daughters, who are busy jumping the centuries to put the best possible band together. 

You know – Hendrix, Armstrong, Mozart…

It’s laugh-out-loud funny at times, thin and slow at others, and by the time the climax approaches, the writers have written themselves into a tight spot. But hey, it’s Bill & Ted and it’s impossible not to love them, at least a little. 

Party on, most excellent dudes.

Elsewhere, if you’re fond of rom-coms, do give The Broken Hearts Gallery a go. Yes, it’s loud and in your face, but Geraldine Viswanathan is hugely engaging as the memorabilia-obsessed New York gallery assistant who comes up with the idea of a gallery for broken hearts. 

Also, the laugh count is high and it definitely moves the genre on a tad. Which is just what it needs.