BILL & TED’S BOGUS JOURNEY (1991)
Tagline: Once... they made history. Now... they are history.
(Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy) [PG]
This movie came out back when I was just getting out of high school, but I have never watched a Bill & Ted movie “in full”, until this past week. In this one, we start out in the future where a villain named De Nomoloa (played by Joss Ackland) decides things are just a bit too perfect for him. He blames Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted "Theodore" Logan, and decides to make robot clones of them to go back in time and kill them. They succeed, and now the world is doomed to being “mediocre” if Bill & Ted can rescue their “babes” and play at a critical Battle of the Bands event after outwitting death.
Oh man, let me just say this freakin movie is over the top. It’s got everything from alien inventors to playing twister with death (who is comically played by William Sadler). We get crazy visions of what hell would be like for Bill and Ted and just lots of craziness overall.
Over time Keanu Reeves has become an icon not only in movies but in his personal life, so it is pretty refreshing to see him playing a character less serious than most every role he’s taken on since Ted. Alex Winter is also good in this as Bill. I also noticed both actors voiced the same characters for an animated Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventures TV series. Just for the record, I highly doubt I will ever review that. Pam Grier and George Carlin also had smaller roles in this. I can’t see how anyone would have gotten any awards for acting in this movie, but none of it is bad and it all feels like the casting fits.
Score and soundtrack wise this movie is pretty decent. I do find it slightly lazy that they didn’t bother writing an original song for Bill and Ted to play at the Battle Of The Bands (given that the two main characters are in a band), but using a KISS song probably wasn’t the worst choice ever. By the way, “God Gave Rock ‘N’ Roll To You” was actually done by a band called ARDENT first, then PETRA, and later KISS only under a slightly different name and different lyrics. Cinematically this movie works and director Peter Hewitt does a decent job getting the lighting right in some of the “hell” scenes. Some of the sets are pretty great.
In spite of its stronger points and a pretty cool cast, I didn’t find myself enjoying the dialog in this movie. In fact, the dialog makes this thing feel really dated and not in the cool retro way I was hoping. Some elements in the script are “Bill and Ted”, I guess but come across as tacky. The movie also feels disjointed in many ways like parts of the story were just missing and everything was slammed together with duct tape. None of that means this movie isn’t just really fun and goofy to watch. For those reasons, I am going to give it a somewhat generous 4 out of 7. It would have taken quite a bit to pull this up to a 5 for me, but I do believe on a rainy afternoon with your movie watching choices drying up, this one is worth your time.
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