Bill & Ted Face the Music review round-up: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter's film is 'weightless, super goofy'

Bill & Ted Face the Music, the third instalment of the franchise starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, has been released almost three decades after the last film came out. In the film, Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) create a song that will unite humanity and ‘save reality as we know it’. As they travel through time into the future, they keep on meeting older versions of themselves. The film also stars Jayma Mays and Erinn Hayes as their wives and introduces Brigette Lundy-Paine and Samara Weaving as their daughters Billie and Thea, respectively. CNN’s Brian Lowry calls the film a “recycling project” that some fans may have waited for a long time. He said the film has amusing homages and callbacks in some parts of it. Lowry added that silliness of the exercise, and absence of pretensions, works in its favor. This may be for Reeves, who is always there to relish getting to show off a lighter side that doesn’t come saddled with the body count of his John Wick/Matrix duties. AO Scott from The New York Times states that both Bill and Ted belong to a generation very closely identified with failure as to be routinely erased from the record. He said the new film by Dean Parisot is “an amiable, sloppy attempt to reassert the value of friendliness and crack a few jokes along the way”. [caption id=“attachment_8763611” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] A still from Bill & Ted Face the Music. Image from Twitter[/caption] Variety’s Owen Gleiberman writes that the film is weightless and super-goofy, “A blissed-out air balloon of nostalgia. It zips right along, it makes you smile and chortle, it’s a surprisingly sweet-spirited love story (about Bill and Ted trying to live up to their marriages — though the real love story is, of course, the one that takes place between the two of them), and it’s a better tribute to the one-world utopian power of classic rock than ‘Yesterday’ was”. Explaining why the film works, Indiewire’s Eric Kohn said that the follow-up (film) involves an ironic disconnect at the core of the franchise. The critic explains, “Such blinkered stupidity couldn’t possibly save the universe, but there’s a fundamental joy to pretending otherwise. Resurrecting the fantasy of the earlier entries, Bill & Ted Face the Music doesn’t devolve into a pure nostalgia play. It’s just another Bill & Ted movie — kooky, surreal, and completely adherent to its own playbook. And that’s why, more or less, it works”.