FILM REVIEW
Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good;
7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2:
Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.
BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC
Dir: Dean Parisot
BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC
Dir: Dean Parisot
Stars: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Samara Weaving, Brigette Lundy-Paine
Running Time: 92mins
The trend for reviving beloved films and TV shows decades after their natural expiration point has rarely yielded positive results, in no small part because such resurrections often feel like a cynical combination of creative laziness and economic desperation. If there's one thing to be said for Bill & Ted Face The Music, it's that this is as far from a cynical movie as it gets. Nobody involved needed to make it, having all been successful to varying degrees in their own right, and arguably nobody was particularly clamouring to see it, with the originals being cult favourites rather than pop cultural behemoths. Instead, the movie feels like all involved wanted to make it for no other reason than, well, they wanted to make it.
Those good intentions seep into the movie itself, which wholesale carries over the good vibes attitude from Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey. The humour is defiantly Gen X, all very shaggy dog and hang-loosey, which is borderline subversive when all other forms of entertainment feel the need to inject politics or ideological preaching into its storytelling. Almost thirty years later, Bill & Ted's philosophy is as pure as it always was: be excellent to each other and party on, dudes.
Although the movie quickly falls apart on a narrative level, featuring three subplots of which one is too simple, one is a barely-disguised repeat of Excellent Adventure, and the third happens almost entirely off-screen, a number of good decisions hold it together on the emotional level where Bill & Ted movies are always most enjoyed. The first is that while the film deals with the characters' ageing, it doesn't lean so heavily into it as to turn into melodrama. That our heroes are now middle-aged and have yet to write the humanity-uniting song which was prophesized for them is a clever conceit providing just enough context to justify their latest jaunt through time and space.
The second is that while this is a Bill & Ted movie through and through, it offers plentiful nods to past instalments but doesn't depend on them to the extent that the movie cannot function on its own terms. The beloved catchphrases are there, but only deployed a few times. The movie ties into the series' continuity, but doesn't give the impression its sole purpose for existing is to remind fans of past triumphs. I suspect those unfamiliar with previous movies will not enjoy this as much as existing fans, but that will be down to its generation-specific humour and characters rather than nostalgia being all it has to offer.
Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter recapture their easy-going dynamic, although make very different choices when it comes to their characters. Winter slips back into Bill's boundless enthusiasm as though Bogus Journey finished shooting ten minutes before this one started, adding enough nuance to reflect the character's advanced age while remaining very much the Bill of old. Reeves goes in the opposite direction. His Ted feels wearier and smiles less, retaining prior speech patterns and mannerisms but with his youthful gusto worn down. This sometimes works and sometimes doesn't: it gives the character more depth and the outline of an arc, but Reeves struggles to reconcile this older version of the character with dialogue often written in the voice of a younger man.
For those clamouring after a more straighforward Bill & Ted adventure, the characters' daughters are essentially the same as their dads (whom, in one of several amusing gags at the inseparability of the title duo, they literally call 'dads' rather than addressing them individually) and their subplot is a spiritual repeat of Excellent Adventure. Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-Paine are every bit as lovably stupid as the Reeves-Winter pairing of old and having them take after their fathers so directly ties into the movie's sweet, familial vibe. Unfortunately, the Princesses (Bill & Ted's wives) are as superfluous as ever and the fact their 'story' is shunted off-screen almost seems like a joke at how under-served the characters have been despite appearing in all three outings.
As a story, the movie has little to offer on its own, lacking anything as inventive as Napoleon going down a waterslide, the all-time great 'Oedipal complex' one-liner from Excellent Adventure or the heavy metal vision of hell from Bogus Journey: the hell depicted here is far more traditional. Narratively, both Bill & Ted and their daughters' journeys feel like treading water to the finale, being respectively too episodic and too familiar to leave an impression. Even shy that originality, the movie is open-hearted and charming enough to make a return to the world of these characters a welcome one. At 92 minutes, it runs as long as it needs to without dragging on. If Face The Music is not quite triumphant, it is certainly a long way from bogus. [ 6 ]
THE NEW MUTANTS
Dir: Josh Boone
Stars: Maisie Williams, Anya Taylor-Joy, Alice Braga, Blu Hunt
Running Time: 98mins
The New Mutants comes laden with the baggage of being the death throes of Fox's X-Men saga, mercifully terminated by the Disney buyout following two critically reviled flops, the dreadful Apocalypse and its follow-up, Dark Phoenix, which re-ran the plot of the derided X-Men: The Last Stand and somehow did it far worse. New Mutants is all that remains of a series which began the present superhero movie craze but ended in ignominy.
Truth be told, New Mutants is a better swansong for the series than expected. It's not good by any stretch of the imagination, but its fusing of superhero characters with One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest asylum drama and light horror inflections at least make it feel like something different, a bottle episode of a series whose obsession with meaningless CG-spectacle ultimately proved its downfall. The movie does end with a CGI battle, although one comparatively small and over fairly quickly. Up until that point, much of the time is spent with the characters chatting to each other, trying to work out where they are, how to control their powers and how the two might be related.
The characters are less personalities and more archetypes, with the vulnerable bad girl, the tormented rich guy, the religious escapee and the mysterious overseer/doctor all present and correct. It's a plot-driven movie but without the breakneck urgency which frequently makes superhero outings more exhausting than enjoyable. The tempered pace does give it the aura of a TV spin-off, but as with Bill & Ted, having breathing space is an increasingly rare and appreciable commodity in the modern movie landscape.
The movie is otherwise best described as 'adequate'. Performances are fine across the board, although the actors are given little to test them beyond Anya Taylor-Joy's shaky Soviet accent (and yes, it's Soviet rather than Russian). The level of subtlety in the writing is best demonstrated by how the motifs of certain scenes are foreshadowed by clips from specifically selected episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
None of the characters are particularly compelling and have perhaps been made even less interesting than their comic book progenitors: a minor controversy has arisen over the casting of a white actor as Bobby, who is mixed race in the comics. While this might usually be dismissed as another Twitter strop, the comic character's race is reportedly tied into how his powers first manifested, which sounds far more individualised than the rote backstory the character is given in the movie.
None of the characters are particularly compelling and have perhaps been made even less interesting than their comic book progenitors: a minor controversy has arisen over the casting of a white actor as Bobby, who is mixed race in the comics. While this might usually be dismissed as another Twitter strop, the comic character's race is reportedly tied into how his powers first manifested, which sounds far more individualised than the rote backstory the character is given in the movie.
Elsewhere, the direction functions to tell the story coherently without enlivening it in any way, the score is completely unnoticeable and the plot plays out by the numbers, entirely predictable from the moment Danielle, the audience surrogate, arrives in the hospital where the rest of the movie takes place. The movie's devotion to predictability goes so far as to open with a monologue which serves no purpose other than to indirectly give away information which would have been far more dramatically effective to let the audience discover alongside the characters later on.
Anyone going into New Mutants expecting a hate-watch on the basis of Disney's withering assessment or the movie being kicked around the release schedule will likely be disappointed. This is a functional, disposable C-tier movie to the letter, exactly what should be expected from the writer/director of such rom-com filler as Stuck In Love and contrived teen tearjerker The Fault In Our Stars. It's nothing anyone could get excited about, yet its slow pace ironically makes it somewhat satisfying as a cap for the X-Men series which deserved a better conclusion than the Apocalypse/Dark Phoenix car crashes. That it hints at series-related developments never to come adds a touch of bitter amusement to a mediocrity which the incompetence of previous instalments almost turn into a strength. [ 5 ]
