I enjoyed Bill and Ted's Face the Music, but it lacked the joy of its predecessors.
Thirty years after their epic adventures Bill and Ted are still searching for that song. The Future Dudes have run out of patience. Reality, and their marriages to the Princesses are falling apart at the seams. Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves do a fantastic job of bringing their characters into the now. Two Gen X guys who never gave up the dream, but really seem to need to give up the dream; Bill and Ted are whom I thought they'd be.
The plot is great, everything about this movie would have worked out for me had the directors, producers, writers, whomever not wholly bought into a gag that feels wrong and out of place the entire film: Thea and Billie's referential 80s speak is awful.
Their dialogue comes from the uncanny valley of scriptwriting.
I do not understand why someone didn't see this early on and give the joke up. Sadly, the movie commits to it and it makes two otherwise great characters hard to take. The film managed to update while mimicking Bill and Ted's look, their mannerisms, and their style so well, and then the script just has them randomly blurt out "excellent" or 'totally' out of place.
I get it and those two actors, Samara Weaving as Thea and Bridgette Lundy-Paine as Billie, did an amazing job portraying someone elses' flat joke. Their 80s terminology was misused and out of character. I can best explain this to folks who haven't seen the film by referencing another great film of the era, Point Break:
Bodhi tells Johnny Utah: "You are one radical god damn son of a bitch!"
No one ever used radical like that.
When Bill and Ted use old vernacular in the film, dudes in their early 50s used to talk that way. In the earlier movies it was current vernacular and used in a grammatically and contextually consistent manner — the script totally fails Billie and Thea. If they had spoken like folks their own age it'd have been better, as it was the true heroes of the movie felt off.
In a movie all about awesome daughters, Kristen Schall also does a fantastic job as Kelly, Rufus' daughter. They honor George Carlin's Rufus in a very nice manner and her character is another very-Bill and Ted addition that helps keep the movie going.
I only have one other bone to pick with this film: Station deserved more. Kid Cudi, playing himself, honored Station with a name drop — but Station was missing and seemed easy to bring back.
This is a fun Bill and Ted adventure. It may have ended their quest, but set up Billie and Thea for an interesting future.
