There’s a New ‘Bill and Ted’ Movie in the Works
Hollywood is really scraping the bottom of the barrel for movies to reboot, so we’re getting a second sequel to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, starring Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, reports Deadline. For some reason, people are really excited about it, I assume because Keanu Reeves learned to act since the first film was released.
When we last picked up with the most audacious dudes they were time-traveling teenagers trying to pass history class and win the battle of the bands. Once prophesized to save the universe with their rock and roll, according to the production the new movie will see the two best friends as middle-aged men with family responsibilities who have yet to fulfill their destiny. They’ve written thousands of tunes, but they have yet to write a good one, much less the greatest song ever written. With the fabric of time and space tearing around them, a visitor from the future warns the duo that only their music can save life as we know it. Out of luck and inspiration, Bill and Ted set out on another time travel adventure — with the help of their daughters, a new crop of historical figures, and some sympathetic music legends — to seek the song that will set their world right and bring harmony in the universe as we know it.
I don’t know if you’ve actually seen Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but it doesn’t hold up to the march of time the way fellow beloved ’80s films like Back to the Future, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Ghostbusters do. I watched it fairly recently and was left unimpressed. Don’t worry, this isn’t a hand-wringing essay about how I had to struggle to come to grips with the fact that I once enjoyed a movie written in the ’80s using the word “f*g” or anything, it’s just that Bill and Ted is pretty juvenile in its humor and lacks the charm of Back to the Future.
The movies that get this sort of reboot/remake/sequel are generally movies that were popular at the time but don’t hold up, much like Bill and Ted. No one is trying to remake John Hughes’ movies because no one is going to make a version of those films better than John Hughes did. And no one is going to remake a bad film because the whole idea is to cash in on the nostalgia people have for a popular brand. So we get remakes and sequels to middling movies that were sort of just okay. If you’ve seen Cobra Kai on YouTube, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
There are a lot of things I liked in the ’80s that don’t really hold up today. I watched an episode of G.I. Joe a few years ago and I’m convinced, to this day, that I was a complete idiot when I was a kid. It was poorly written and even more poorly acted. I felt the same way re-watching Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It’s an okay movie that got some attention at the time, and it already had one borderline-unwatchable sequel. And this one isn’t even going to have George Carlin in it.
