‘Bill & Ted Face the Music’ review: Not so excellent

More On: alex winter

Since Keanu Reeves last played Ted in “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” in 1991, we have watched him brutally kill hundreds of people. In the “Matrix” trilogy, his Neo was a Zen murder machine who could level whole cities with a little karate and a trenchcoat. Later, in “John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum,” he borrowed …

Since Keanu Reeves last played Ted in “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” in 1991, we have watched him brutally kill hundreds of people.

In the “Matrix” trilogy, his Neo was a Zen murder machine who could level whole cities with a little karate and a trenchcoat. Later, in “John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum,” he borrowed a library book to fatally break a thug’s neck. This actor has spilled swimming pools of (fake) blood.

That’s why it’s a stretch to buy Reeves, 55, again as an air-guitaring stoner in the new sequel “Bill & Ted Face the Music.” When “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” made him a star 31 years ago, he was a high-spirited doofus with an infectious smile. Reeves has moved on, and now has about one-millionth of the enthusiasm that made him so much fun in this role before.

This whole half-baked sequel is a forced exercise, willed into being by the so-called “Keanussance” — society’s renewed love affair with Reeves. He’s a nice guy and a decent actor, but he’s made a lame movie. It’ll let down even hardcore fans.

Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted haven’t aged a day — they’ve aged 10,585 days. The Wyld Stallyns are now hopeless domestics, married to the 15th-century British princesses they brought home in “Excellent Adventure,” and each couple has a daughter who is just like her dad.

Samara Weaving, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in a scene from “Bill & Ted Face the Music.”AP

There is a lot of daddy-daughter stuff going on, probably to broaden the film’s appeal beyond adult dudes. The guys, who are now playing gigs in half-empty bars, are summoned to the future by Rufus’ (the late George Carlin) kid Kelly (Kristen Schaal), where they’re told a song they will write will save the universe. “Excellent!” we hope.

The plot then rips off the original — which was thin to begin with — and makes it worse. The guys use the time-traveling phone booth to search for their song, while their daughters travel into the past to round up some luminaries to play it: Jimi Hendrix, Louis Armstrong, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, ancient Chinese flautist Ling Lun and, for good measure, Kid Cudi. None of them are funny.

Two performances here do get some laughs, though. There’s a menacing killer robot — sent to vaporize Bill and Ted — who we later learn has crippling anxiety and is named Dennis (Anthony Carrigan). And, of course, the return of the Grim Reaper, played by William Sadler, who relives his rock ‘n’ roll glory days. Their material is no wittier or inspired than anybody else’s, but they do their jobs as actors and don’t rely so much on nostalgia and mugging. It does no one any favors that director Dean Parisot can’t set up a gag.

But this series lives and dies on Bill and Ted. You can still feel the crumbs of chemistry between Reeves and Winter, who is more believable in his part because he makes fewer major movies. But you can also sense their exhaustion and ambivalence.

At the end of the movie, Bill and Ted pass the torch to their hard-rocking daughters, Thea (Samara Weaving) and Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine). Instead, they should take that torch and set fire to this whole enterprise for good.