Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey; fantasy comedy, USA, 1991; D: Peter Hewitt, S: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, William Sadler, Joss Ackland, Annette Azcuy, Sarah trigger, Pam Grier, George Carlin

In the perfect future, there are some people who rebel against constant peace and rock music, so they want to destroy its origins: a song written centuries ago by teenagers Bill and Ted in the 20th century. The rebels, led by Nomolos, send two androids in the past that look exactly like Bill and Ted, who kill the said rockers, take their place and covertly start composing bad songs. In the meantime, the souls of real Bill and Ted enter Hell, then Heaven, and then go back to Earth after they swayed Death, joining forces with some alien monster than can split into half in order to create two new androids that will eliminate their impostors.

Since the very fun comedy "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure", assembled like a sci-fi forerunner to "Wayne's World", became a box office hit, it spanned a TV animated show and, unfortunately, this sequel that seems to have left almost all virtues and simplicity of the original in the 1st film, which is why it was declared as a worse successor by the critics. It is an "intrudor", alienating itself from the original concept to switch from sci-fi to a fantasy comedy, becoming a too complicated mess of a film and as a whole minimally fun, where humor and that fine 'hangout' mood were replaced with disgust just to keep viewers from feeling bored. Only Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter still have that charm as the title youngsters and their effort is the only reason to see the story—which is as far removed from the 1st film as one could have thought. Instead of bringing another round of historical figures to interact in the present, like in the 1st film, this sequel just abandons the said amusing time travel concept and decides to pursue a completely different (misguided) direction, bringing in Death and two troll aliens—but at the end of the day, the sole sequence of Napoleon sliding at the Waterloo Water Park in the original film had more charm than all the scenes involving Death in this film put together, since William Sadler is underused. Underdeveloped and chaotic, blowzy and careless, entirely insane and bizarre (in Hell, Bill is tortured by being ordered to kiss his ugly grandmother with a moustache, whereas Ted is haunted by a plastic Easter Bunny (?) that looks like "Chucky"), where only a couple of jokes save the thing (in an amusing bit, it is revealed that Bill's stepmother divorced his father and married Ted's father), this is an uninspired-avarage flick that displays an interesting trend of the series: when the title has the word "excellent" in it, it is excellent, when the title has the word "bogus" in it, it is bogus.

Grade:+