1991 Comedy, rated PG, runs 1 hour, 34 minutes
Written by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon
Directed by Peter Hewitt (I guess Stephen Herek was insufficiently triumphant)
- Major Cast
- Keanu Reeves
Alex Winter
William Sadler
- Supporting Cast
-
Annette Azcuy
Sarah Trigger
George Carlin
Joss Ackland
The DVD contains a ten-minute featurette and a theatrical trailer. Language choices are
English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, all also available as subtitles.
How do you say bodacious in Portuguese?
C-Dawg says: Two Paws up
Let's look first at reasons you may not have seen this movie.
- Keanu Reeves is in it.
Okay, I can't do anything about that. You're excused.
- Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure was silly.
Yes, it was -- but it was also modestly funny. Journey is
silly, too, but much funnier. Unless you also thought that
Adventure was incredibly stupid, I recommend you stick with
us here.
- Keanu Reeves is in it.
I thought you left. All you folks who won't watch a movie for that
reason, do yourself a favor and leave. I happen to enjoy his work.
Okay, why you should watch.[1]
- The Truth about the Afterlife
Find out what you really have to look forward to when you find
yourself in Heaven or Hell.
- Bodacious or Heinous? Find out
Will the future remain the bodacious one that Rufus knows and loves,
or be twisted instead into a truly non-non-Heinous alternative?
- The Reaper Rap
I guarantee[2] that you'll laugh when The Grim Reaper
raps out this little ditty (and revealing it here won't spoil
your enjoyment at all, because his performance is the thing):
You might be a King
Or a little street sweeper;
But sooner or later,
You'll dance with the Reaper
The Story
As the movie opens, we find ourselves in the future, as a class is
about to start at Bill & Ted University. Rufus
(George Carlin) enters as the professor, and from his opening
remarks we learn that the entire society of the future is modelled on
the philosophy of (bow your heads) Bill & Ted.
Be Excellent to each other! But the class is
disrupted by the entrance of DeNomolos and his armed hooligans.
He seizes the time travelling phone booth, in which Rufus had arrived
with Johann Sebastian Bach, and uses it to send two robots, identical
in appearance to Bill and Ted, back in time to the present day; their task
is to kill Bill and Ted, and perform
terribly in their place in The Battle of The Bands, thereby altering
the course of the future to one more suited
to DeNomolos' tastes.
They do indeed quickly dispatch Bill and Ted, then head off to play
with the Princess Babes while they wait for the Battle. Bill and Ted,
looking at their bodies lying on the ground, notice the black-robed
bald man with the Scythe, who informs them that he is there to
take them to the afterlife. NO! We've gotta save
the babes! It turns out there is a clause in the rules that will allow
them to stay: they must challenge Death and win. After they spend some
time in their own personal Hells, Death appears for the challenge.
Not playing totally
by the rules, Death, losing the first contest, changes the terms to
"best two out of three", then three of five. Finally, having lost at
Battleship, Clue, and Twister, he admits that he is
defeated, and he is at their service.
They tell him that they need to find someone who can help them build
"good robot us'es" to defeat the "evil robot us'es". Where can they
find the smartest scientist ever? Death takes them to Heaven,
where God allows the smartest scientist ever, a dead Martian, to
return to Earth and help them. A big shopping spree at
Builder's Emporium nets him everything he needs and the robots are
manufactured in the back of the van as they drive to the Battle of the
Bands.
They arrive just in time to see Wild Stallyns introduced. They
interrupt to have the robots fight each other, the good us'es of course
triumphant, meanwhile saving the babes
who are tied to the rafters.
As they're about to start their performance, DeNomolos arrives in
the phone booth to do the job right. A few humorous turnabouts involving
time travel ("after we win, we have to remember to go back and....", as
in Adventure) take care of that situation, and Bill and Ted
are ready to play. (Realizing they're terrible musicians, they take
the phone booth and go off somewhere for a year and a half of intense
music lessons (except for the two-week joint honeymoon in medieval
England) and return a moment later.)
With Death and "the guy who can make one word mean anything" backing
them up, they wow the crowd and ensure the continued existence of a
bodacious future.
Some funny stuff
The ending credits roll while a succession of newspaper and magazine
covers spin onto the screen, chronicling the world-shaping events
surrounding the mega-success of (the now-augmented) Wild Stallyns.
Do not turn off the movie! This is one of the funniest parts.
Everything William Sadler does in this movie, in
the role of Death, is hilarious. Without his performance, this would be
pretty much a recap of Adventure; with it, this is a case of
the sequel being better than the original. In addition to his visual
delivery of his lines, his accent (which I don't know how to describe)
adds extra value, also.
- (to God:) Sorry about this -- they melvined me
- (in the hardware store, swinging a rake and comparing to his scythe) Baahh!
- (to a coughing man with a cigarette) I'll see you real soon
- (Bill, sighs) Best of seven?
(Death) You're damned right!
- (joining a game of Charades) Oh, oh! "Butch and Sundance: The Early Years"
(Bill, dumbfounded) Death!
(Death, abashed) Sorry
There may be some reason of which I am unaware why that was a stupid thing
to say, but it's funny anyway[3]
A humorous addition, totally irrelevant to the story, is that
Missy (Amy Stock-Poynton), the young buxom stepmother to Bill
in Adventure, has now divorced Bill's dad and married Ted's.
STATION!
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[1] That list is supposed to count down to 1; unfortunately, E2 doesn't allow the HTML attribute
that would make that happen.
[2] Your payment for this review will be refunded if you don't.
[3] If you must know, the answer was
Smokey and the Bandit III, guessed by Albert Einstein