Keanu Reeves, our lord and saviour, has always been something different to the last few generations. To the current one, he's John Wick. To mine, he's Neo. And to the one before? He was surfer dude rocker Ted Logan, good-natured doofus who, alongside his equally tubular friend Bill Preston (Alex Winter), had an excellent adventure in their 1989 film debut in which they happily disrupt the spacetime continuum to pass a school history test.
I wouldn't call Bill and Ted a nostalgic staple for me or anything, but the first two films are decent enough fun, with such highlights as George Carlin, bass-playing Death, and Genghis Khan rampaging in a clothing store. Other than some sadly typical eighties casual homophobia, they're still a charming enough watch. Now, nearly thirty years after their second film, but with Keanu and co-star Winter back and quite willing, does it manage to recapture of that air-guitaring charm?
Nearly thirty years on after we saw them, Bill and Ted are middle-aged musicians (whose mannerisms haven't changed since high school) struggling to get out of their rut and meet the prophecy that they will create a song that will unite the world. Their hair-brained attitude to things also has kept, as they take their temporally displaced medieval princess wives to couples therapy...all at the same time. Eventually, however, circumstances lit a fire under their collective ass once it becomes imperative, for reasons that make about as much sense as a typical Doctor Who season finale, that they have to make the song or the whole universe dies. So, it's back into the totally-not-a-TARDIS phone booth time machine to start giving Einstein aneurysms!
Between all this we have the main subplot of their respective daughters, who are also skipping across the timeline to pick up musicians for the aforementioned world-unifying song. I was worried this was going to lead to more tired schtick about millennials vs generation X or whatever, but fortunately, the younger Preston and Logan, Thea and Billie, (Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-Paine), are just as amusing to watch. They're not far off from their fathers, but with more focus on music history, and the actresses managed to sell them as endearing enough. How can you not like people who pluck Louis Armstrong through time to recruit Jimi Hendrix for a jam session?
Oh, and if it's different flavors of Keanu you want, this film delivers. I get the sense the filmmakers had fun pulling Mr. John Wick Anderson Mnemonic into all manners of costumes and personas, from some sort of British-accented goth rocker to an wheezy geriatric still trying to rock. And, considering how po-faced most of Keanu's roles in recent times tend to be, I also get the sense he too was pretty keen just to relax and do all kinds of silly things for this one.
There's also a decent amount of secondary characters who make their mark, like a neurotic future assassin robot (Anthony Carrigan), and of course, the bass-obsessed Death (William Sadler). For the most part, these all fit the general feeling I had with the film--nothing that'll blow your mind, but cute enough that you won't mind going along with it anyway.
Other than a kind of abrupt ending, there's nothing majorly flawed about Face the Music for what it's trying to be. In a sense, I found it not only a nice throwback to the original two flicks, but a throwback to when films could just relax and try out silly concepts like this, instead of being overblown or annoyingly self-aware or whatever. While it was, due to ongoing global circumstance, mostly on streaming at first release, it was only really accessible in theaters where I am--but I certainly didn't mind, as it was sort of refreshing to have a little piece like this on, ironically, a big screen. Party on and give it a try.
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