Bill & Ted Face the Music

Stars: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, William Sadler, Jayma Mays, Erinn Hayes, Samara Weaving, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Kristen Schaal, Holland Taylor, Kid Cudi, Jillian Bell, Anthony Carrigan, Weird Al Yankovic

Director: Dean Parisot

Partied out, dudes. This 'threequel' to the once delightfully daffy series is very much a labour of love for its stars, although 'labour' is too often the operative word, as our dippy duo once again try to save the world by means of time-travel. Even so, there are enough genial guffaws here to cause diehard aficionados to ignore the lethargy of much of the action, directed by Dean Parisot, who made one of my favourite comic parodies Galaxy Quest, but is below his best here.

Now middle-aged (Reeves is looking old and haggard whereas Winter has hardly changed), ever guitar-happy and playing their manic music, our most excellent friends are still struggling to write the song that will ensure the future of the universe; so they clamber once again into their teleporting telephone box (Dr Who should sue), embarking on a frantic quest to steal the vital song, when it's completed, from their future selves. Whoa!

Not only that, but they're pursued by their curvaceous and equally music-mad daughters (Weaving, Lundy-Paine), who plan to use time-travel to assemble the band to beat them all, melding classical composers with such genre giants as Jimi Hendrix and Louis Armstrong. The mind boggles.

They could even be joined by the bass guitar of Death-Dude, a part in which Sadler once again has rollicking, non-heinous fun. A touching ending just about moves the stop-start shenanigans into the six-out-of-10 category: that, and the affection in which Bill & Ted fans continue to hold our quite egregious heroes! Hard to understand, by the way, what the American classifiers saw here to give the film a PG-13 over there.

David Quinlan

USA 2020. UK Distributor: Warner Brothers. Colour by FotoKem.
91 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: PG.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 0, Violence/Horror 0, Drugs 0, Swearing 0.

Review date: 20 Sep 2020