BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE
A film review by Jeff Meyer
Copyright 1989 Jeff Meyer
Well, I have to make it unanimous. There is something disarmingly pleasant about BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE, and it is certainly a very funny film, though it gets by on a premise I usually find tedious to the extreme in a comedy. In other words, the Laughing at the Dolts syndrome, where the main source of humor is a group of individuals so dumb that you laugh at them. For instance, I don't like the Three Stooges, Jerry Lewis or any film with Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise together.
But... but there's something about Bill and Ted, two clueless dudes from southern California whose rather dense reactions to the most bizarre circumstances kept me a-grinnin' throughout the majority of the picture. I do admit that the premise got things off to a good start -- it turns out that Bill and Ted's music will someday bring Earth to an age of Utopia (water slides and everything, dude) -- but without the help of their ancestors, they'll flunk their history paper and be split up when Ted's dad sends him to the military academy. The paper, which is supposed to be an exposition on how various historical figures were react to being introduced to the California mini-mall culture, is turned into a research project when Bill and Ted are handed a time machine and decide to "go bag some historical figures, dude!" You can take it from there...
While much of the humor from comes from watching Bill and Ted's single-minded quest, there's a pleasant, humorous aura around the rest of the film. Little background details, like Billy the Kid and Socrates learning to play Nerf Football in the background, and Bill's reaction to his step-mother (nubile and only a few years older than himself) add a gentler strain of humor than some of the more apparent slapstick. There are slow spots (the trip to the future, and some gratuitous water-sliding by Napoleon), but the rest is constantly entertaining, with even a few time-travel tricks I've never seen done in a film before (and taken to a fairly hilarious point).
Sure, I could say that seeing Abraham Lincoln saying "Party on, dudes!" made it all worth while. But that would be selling BILL AND TED way short. Hell, there's 50 zillion summer films heading your way at breakneck speed; get a little spring humor under your belt before you try swallowing a BATMAN and STAR TREK combo.
And remember... be excellent to one another.
Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
INTERNET: moriarty@tc.fluke.COM
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