tek's rating:

Bill & Ted Face the Music (PG-13)
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This came out in 2020 (29 years after the previous movie in the franchise, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey). I found it funny, but not quite as funny as the first two movies. Which is fine, because I felt like the genre itself was less comedic in nature. (I considered putting my review somewhere other than "comedy", such as "sci-fi" or even "coming of age," considering Bill & Ted still hadn't really done that yet, even in what must be their early 50s. But ultimately I went with comedy, for the sake of consistency.) It has somewhat more of a dramatic feel, I think, since the stakes are so high and there's so little time to save the universe, and the main characters are obviously more desperate than ever before. But anyway, I liked it a lot, even if I didn't quite love it as I did the first two movies.

After the amazing success Wyld Stallyns had with their musical career at the end of the second movie, things went downhill. Ever since then, Bill & Ted have worked hard to create the song that's meant to unite the world, but they constantly fail. They're loved by their music-enthusiast daughters, Thea and Billie, but there's starting to be some strain in their marriages to Joanna (Jayma Mays) and Elizabeth (Erinn Hayes), so they start couples counseling. Meanwhile, in the future, history is starting to unravel because "the song" hasn't been written yet in 2020. The great leader (Holland Taylor) sends her and Rufus's daughter, Kelly (Kristen Schaal) to get Bill & Ted to hurry up, before the universe implodes on itself. They decide to go ever-farther into their own futures to steal the song from their older selves, but have no luck. Meanwhile, Thea and Billie travel ever-farther into the past to recruit great musicians for a band to play the song their fathers are supposed to write. And for some reason, the great leader decides Bill & Ted must die to save the universe, so she sends a killer robot after them. Eventually everyone ends up in Hell, where they seek help from estranged bandmate Death.

In the end, there's a revelation that I saw coming all along, but something I didn't see coming is that the song itself isn't what's truly important to save the universe and unite the world. Which I kind of liked, because it would have been pretty much impossible to make a song that believably had that much power. Anyway, there's a happy ending that presumably concludes the story once and for all. Plus there's a post-credits scene. It was definitely a fun movie that I'm very glad to have seen. I feel like I should be saying more about it, but I'm not sure what else to say.


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