Not, perhaps, excellent, but certainly not egregious

Rating: 6/10 (29 November 2009)

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" is a film I thought I wouldn't enjoy. I missed it when it was in the cinemas, when I was twenty years closer to the age of the main characters than I am now, and caught it recently when it was shown on television one Saturday afternoon. (It seems to be a standard assumption on the part of British TV executives that anyone uninterested in the sport which forms the largest part of their output on Saturday afternoons must be a lover of old films). I knew that it was primarily made for the teen market and that it concerned the adventures of two schoolboys, so I assumed that it would be horribly dated. (Nothing, after all, dates more quickly than youth culture, especially teen culture).
Actually, the film is both more enjoyable and less like something from an eighties time capsule than I thought it would be. Certainly, the two leading characters speak in an outlandish slang with only a passing resemblance to Standard English, but I suspect that it would have sounded pretty outlandish even in 1989, at least in Britain where nobody, not even teenagers, ever spoke like that. A central feature of this dialect is that it takes words which normally are used only in formal contexts and uses them as colloquialisms. Thus something very good is "excellent", whereas something very bad is "egregious" or "heinous". "Bogus" also means "very bad", instead of its normal meaning of "not genuine", and any human being, especially a male one, is a "dude", pronounced "dood".
William "Bill" Preston and Theodore "Ted" Logan are two teenagers from San Dimas, California. (In keeping with hallowed Hollywood tradition, they are played by actors in their mid twenties). Their great passion is for rock music and their ambition is to found a rock band which they have provisionally named "Wyld Stallyns", even though their talent as performers is minimal. Their talent for academic work is equally minimal (as evidenced by their eccentric spelling), and they are on the verge of failing their high school history class. Ted's authoritarian father has threatened him that unless he passes history he will be sent to a military academy in Alaska.
They are saved by the intervention of Rufus, a time-traveller from the future. (Rufus's time machine is designed to look like a phone booth, a detail borrowed directly from Dr Who's Tardis). It would appear that several centuries from now the music of "Wyld Stallyns" serves as the basis of an entire civilisation, so Rufus has to ensure that Bill and Ted remain together as the consequences for future history if their rock group is never founded will be too heinous to contemplate. They have the idea of using Rufus' phone booth to travel back into the past and of kidnapping various historical figures to help them with their assignment. So the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte, Billy the Kid, Abraham Lincoln and Socrates (whose name Bill and Ted insist on pronouncing as "So-Crates") find themselves transported forward in time to the San Dimas of 1988. In another development Bill and Ted, travelling to 15th Century England, fall in love with the King's daughters Princess Elizabeth and Princess Joanna (not actual historical figures).
We see the reactions of the historical characters to the California of the late eighties. Thus Napoleon discovers the delights of ice cream and water slides (which play a large part in the film, largely because San Dimas is famous for its water theme park), Joan of Arc (who Bill and Ted discover is not married to Noah, as they had previously thought) joins an aerobics group and Ludwig van Beethoven becomes a fan of rock music. The real Beethoven was of course deaf, but this is not a film which places a premium on historical accuracy. I thought, in fact, that more humour could have been derived from the contrast between modern life and life in the past, but this opportunity was missed, possibly because the film was originally aimed at those with a knowledge of history that was only slightly greater than that of Bill and Ted.
Nevertheless, the film is generally an amusing and entertaining one; Keanu Reeves (who has since gone on to become a big Hollywood name) and Alex Winter (who hasn't) make an appealing pair of heroes. Certainly, "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" is just so much frothy nonsense, but even nonsense can sometimes be enjoyable. Not, perhaps, quite excellent, but certainly not egregious. 6/10