BILL AND TED's EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1989)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
When I first saw "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" on VHS in 1990, I didn't get it. The humor seemed slapdash and infantile, Bill and Ted were simply dumb, and the situations were lacking in any real zest or invention. After all, this was a time-travel comedy and it was not funny or even remotely comical given the premise. Times change and when I saw the movie again after twenty-plus years, I surprised myself in that I found it consistently funny and spirited. This does not mean I have a discovered a comic gem but it is far better than I thought. Maybe I just had a bad day when I first saw.
Alex Winter is Bill and Keanu Reeves is Ted, and they are the members of a band (Wyld Stallyns) that could benefit from the talents of Eddie Van Halen (and they should learn to play instruments since all they do is play air guitar). Bill and Ted are high-school seniors who are failing History class and unless they pass with an A+, they will flunk. All these two want to do is party, rock out to music and hang out at the Circle K convenient store. Suddenly, a Doctor Who-like phone booth materializes out of thin air and we are introduced to Rufus (George Carlin), a cool dude from the future. Rufus insists that the dim-witted pair travel through time in the phone booth time machine, snatch actual historical people thru the ages and bring them to the present. Bill and Ted bring along Abraham Lincoln, Beethoven, Billy the Kid, Socrates (referred to as So Crates) Joan of Arc and others so they can make their oral history final exam stand out and earn their A+.
Amazingly, I found myself laughing throughout at the sheer silliness of it. How can you hate a movie where Ted waves at Napoleon who is busy firing cannons? How can you hate a movie when Joan of Arc does an aerobics class at a mall, or Beethoven uses a synthesizer and composes electrifying music? How can you hate a movie when Bill and Ted find two bodacious babes from the past and one of them is played by Diane Franklin? The special-effects are zany, Reeves and Winter make for a cheerful pair of thoughtless dudes and it is always nice to see Bernie Casey who plays the history teacher. True, more time could have been spent with the historical icons, giving the actors more to do than the one-dimensional characteristics they portray. The one bit that falters a little involves Napoleon, who is taken to the mall to eat ice cream! This war general should be hopping mad and developing strategies to start his own little war.
The movie has a sweet, simple innocence to it and, oddly, ends with Bill and Ted developing a hint of intelligence (they also decide to learn to play instruments). It is a harmless, pleasurable way to spend 90 minutes with these guys, minus any hardcore gross gags or too many sexual connotations of any kind (the 1991 sequel is just as spirited). The movie gets off on the simple silliness of it all and all you want to do after it is over is to shout, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "Party on dudes!"
