Bill & Ted Face the Music: A Movie Review

I recently had the opportunity to watch Bill & Ted Face the Music. The following review will contain spoilers so consider yourself warned.

The movie is the third in a series featuring forgettable actor Alex Winter and the guy who plays John Wick. The first in the series is arguably a classic, featuring mostly family appropriate humor as two incredibly stupid but good hearted teenagers fumble their way through adventures, guided along the way by a shockingly clean mouthed George Carlin. The second movie was a disaster and will not be discussed further in this writing.

I fully expected the third to be basically family friendly, though at least somewhat permeated with politically correct nonsense. After all, the movie was made in the Current Year and obeisance must be paid to the gods of our rulers. I was not only not disappointed, I substantially undershot the mark.

The main characters in this movie are nominally Bill and Ted, but their daughters play a more pivotal role. In typical Hollywood fashion, the girls speak like their idiot surfer dude dads, ape the physical mannerisms of males, and dress in unfeminine ways. The characters could have been made male with no wardrobe changes and changing one’s nickname.

The film unabashedly and unimaginatively goes back to the central gimmick of the series, which is traveling through time and bringing characters from the past to the present. The nominal difference being instead of collecting historical figures and viewing amusing instances of people from the past colliding with modernity, the girls had to collect the greatest musicians of all time to play a song that would save the world. In a shock to no one, it was a Burger King Kids Club of diversity.

Three black guys, an Asian woman, a black woman, and one incredibly foppish white man were who Hollywood, and likely Rolling Stone, decided were the greatest musicians of all time. One can’t help but laugh at the lengths to which the writers went to avoid casting normalish white men as great musicians. The “greatest drummer of all time” was a black woman from Neolithic Africa, who I kid thee not, was dressed in animal skins, banging on wooden drums with bones for drumsticks. If not for the date on the bottom of the screen, I would have assumed it was modern Africa, as the two are indistinguishable.

It chaps my proverbial hide a bit that they had to make up a character with diversity points instead of using Neil Perth, John Bonham or even the personally repugnant Lars Ulrich. I suppose these actually good drummers have no place in Diverse America, where people must be invented before we can give normal white men credit for something.

The Asian woman was some flautist of legend in China that was allegedly a man in the stories, but to the surprise of the time travelers (not to any audience member with an IQ above 14), he was a she! The gender swap plot twist is painfully unimaginative and lecturing in a pathetic, keening “girls are better than boys, they’ve just somehow been oppressed by their inferiors for all of time and the superior female just hasn’t figured out how to defeat them, because reasons.”

The character displaying the most intellectual prowess was, as the law commands, a black guy who is famous from what I’m told. I assume he is a rapper, given that he appears in shoes that are untied and clothes entirely too large for him. He is named “Kid Cutty” or something similar. The entirety of his musical contribution to the great song was yelling the name of the town the scene took place in one time. It should be appreciated that in that one respect, the movie was realistic.

Some smug black stoner was cast as Jimi Hendrix. He was handed a guitar which he did not seem able to put down, an afro wig, and someone’s outfit from an Austin Powers themed Halloween party. This character’s inclusion in the film seemed to be as a means to remind us that blacks are better than whites at music. This was done during the scene in which Mozart was recruited to this conglomeration of diversity by Hendrix loudly playing a Mozart piece on his guitar and riffing significantly à la Hendrix’s drug addled performance of the “Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock. Of course, Mozart was impressed that his musical work was so mangled and happily joined the group.

The other black male was a dime store quality impersonator of a young Louis Armstrong. It was clear the casting call was “grinning black guy, knowledge of what a trumpet is or how to hold it not required.” It was clear the actor had no idea how to actually play a trumpet nor had he seen one before filming started. This is one of those times when Hollywood is telling on itself without realizing. That they couldn’t be bothered to find a black man who is at least somewhat familiar with how a trumpet works reveals Hollywood’s respect for blacks is superficial at best, and mostly just centered around the fact that they are visibly and unmistakably not white.

The plot twist that was evident the moment the girls were introduced was that it was, as previously stated, they who would write the world saving song, not their stupid white fathers. This is another instance where Hollywood is unintentionally correct by being magnificently self-unaware. The girls are self-professed “music nerds” who cannot play music. One may wonder how these two create this world saving song while being musically illiterate. Surely, this is where Mozart comes in, using his immense prowess and exposure to new instruments and magic negroes to write something brilliant. The viewer would, of course, be wrong, as that would be at least somewhat logical and would give a white male credit for something.

The two completely talentless heroes do not create anything, they do not write anything. No, our two androgynous do-gooders simply tell the cavewoman drummer to drum, then tell the bassist (the actual Grim Reaper) to play a particular song, and the rest fall in line while the girls flail around and play with sound mixers like DJs at a rave. Their fathers, being the title characters, have to come in and contribute something and play guitar, adding just the right notes just in the nick of time. What Hollywood tells us, without realizing it, is that girls need men to get things done, and need their fathers.

What Hollywood also admits to (on accident) is that when women are in charge they don’t have to be talented or in any way able to do or understand what they are instructing others to do. They need only make vague suggestions and be nominally in charge to be given credit for all time. Given that the people from the future never mention anyone involved in the song except the two girls, it would lead one to believe at no point was credit given to the people who did the actual work.

In the modern age, this is what we are to believe are heroes. Not the minor characters who were talented musicians, but the managerial class girls who gave them uselessly nonspecific instruction and pushed a couple buttons, while their fathers and a group of majority males did all the real work. Creativity is now just plagiarism. Learning to read, write and play music is now no better than pushing a button or turning a knob on a sound board.

It is said every author writes a character that represents themselves. The writers of this movie are no different, and likely see themselves as part of the managerial elite – who’s purpose is to make slight adjustments to the works of others before taking credit for that which they do not and cannot do.