Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure Review

By: Michael Lee

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, George Carlin
Year:1989

What a totally excellent movie, dudes! Where can I even start with Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure? It has to be one of the best non-John Hughes comedies to come out of the '80's. It's stupid, irrelevant, and makes no sense half the time, but it does so with such skill it makes it extremely entertaining to watch. You can argue that movies where you have to turn your brain off are a pathetic excuse for bad writing and cheap effects, but this movie is silly and dumb on purpose, and sometimes it even slips in truly funny lines and scenes. F*ck the Matrix, this is Keanu Reeves greatest performance and it's sad that the guy who played Bill didn't star in anymore movies, cause he's just as funny and they both bring life into these dimwitted stereotypical teenage rockers.

It movie starts off with Bill and Ted trying to determine a way to make their rock band, The Wyld Stallyns, awesome, agreeing they need Eddie Van Halen and an excellent music video to even begin to get anywhere. However their rock star dreams are put on hold when they nearly flunk history. This causes Ted's dad to threaten to send him to Alaska for military school, which would end the Wyld Stallyns for good. Now this doesn't fly well with the people of the future, whose lives all revolve around the Wyld Stallyns and their world-peace bringing movies. They send back the one and only George Carlin to help Bill and Ted pass their final history oral exam, which ultimately decides if the duo pass or fail history. Now while any history movie or cliff notes would suffice with today's youth, Bill and Ted decide to pass history with style and flare, or in other words, use the time traveling phone booth George Carlin gave them to steal figures of history and have them speak at their oral presentation. Totally awesome!

Their first stop is France back in, well Napoleon's time, to steal, well, Napoleon. They bring him back to the '80's and leave him with Ted's little brother, who takes him out to an ice cream parlor and bowling. Bill and Ted then track down Billy the Kid and "So-crates", and take them on a journey through time. The wind up in the future to see a world where their music has brought the universe into harmony and ended war and poverty. Excellent! Once they leave there, the foursome end up in Medieval Europe. After sweet talking a couple of princesses and playing a couple of round of star wars with knight armor and swords, the duo face execution by the King. But guess who rescues them by defying a lot of logic? That's right, Socrates and Billy the Kid! So once they escape, Bill and Ted track down Abe Lincoln, Beethoven, Joan of Arc, Sigmond Freud, and Genghis Khan, and bag them all.
They have a couple of problems before returning home, such as loosing track of time and breaking the antenna of the phone booth but eventually the arrive safely in the '80's again.

Well as it turns out, Ted's brother wound up ditching Napoleon and he's hanging out at a water park. For a reason that defies all logic, the duo take their kidnapped com padres to the local mall and leave them there so they know where they'll be at once they are ready to get them for their presentation. Hilarity ensues as Beethoven learns to play an electric keyboard, Socrates and Freud hit on chicks in the food court, and Khan ransacks a sporting goods store with a baseball bat and skateboard. Eventually they all are arrested and taken to jail as Bill and Ted return with Napoleon. Now the duo must use their time traveling powers to break the historical figures out of jail. Also, it was one big cheat to hurry the story along that I can't help to love. Bill and Ted make it to their presentation on time and gives one of the most epic school presentations to grace the cinema world. They pass history and Ted is allowed to stay in San Dima and continue on with the Wyld Stallyns. At the end of the movie, George Carlin returns with two bodacious babes and two futuristic guitars and encourages the boys to actually learn to play their instruments so they wouldn't need Eddie Van Halen to hit it big. Oh, did I mention George Carlin shows off his "own" guitar skills. Ah, what an awesome ending to an awesome movie.

So this movie probably isn't for everyone, especially the thinking person, but it's is an '80's movie that can't be overlooked. As long as you yourself can overlook the laws of physics and reality and such. So the next time you are feeling stupid and looking for a good time, you can't go wrong with Bill and Ted's excellent adventure! Party on dudes!

 

8 out of 10 Nerdism Nerds.