![]() If you ever questioned how Face the Music would continue Bogus Journey's story while respecting it-and, given the irritatingly uniform complexion of positive reviews that don't indicate their authors ever watched Bogus Journey through to the end, you probably didn't-the answer is a hard retcon that is impressive in just how bluntly and inelegantly it overwrites the last film's closing montage. Face the Music is a betrayal, though I guess it's at least one with its heart mostly in the right place. Not the bar, "be better than Bogus Journey," which I never entertained as a possibility, but the bar, "justify your right to exist at all when the prior film and the march of three decades says you shouldn't." And I don't know if it does that, honestly. In an era where legacy sequels have been, by and large, a force for good, Face the Music still had a higher bar than most. Let's assume, because I think it's more likely anyway, that series creators and Face the Music screenwriters Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon are as earnest as they present themselves, and that the long-gestating second sequel that they've been developing with Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves for as long as anybody can now remember was born more of their desire to re-open the Bill & Ted universe to explore it from their new vantage point as middle-aged men-though it pays to remember that, in its way, this is perhaps even more insidious than a cash grab would be. ![]() Which is not to imply that Bill & Ted Face the Music is just some cash-grab if someone wanted to grab cash, they could probably find a better way than continuing the story of a middlingly-popular film series from 1991. Like its fellow 1991 time-travel masterpiece Terminator 2, Bogus Journey held absolutely nothing back, leaving its franchise with no real possibilities to move forward without effectively betraying what it had already accomplished. And then it ends, with the utopian apocalypse that was promised. Bogus Journey was a sequel miracle, proving itself capable of boundless reinvention while still staying entirely true to-hell, even sharpening!-both the fundamental logic of the first film and the all-time-iconic duo at the heart of both. It mixes half a dozen high concepts without them feeling at war with one another it fills itself with smart film references that are so expertly woven into its fabric that they don't even necessarily come off as "film references" while you're watching it it's so shockingly well-crafted as a piece of cinema that it's frankly difficult to understand why Peter Hewitt's second highest-profile movie is Garfield. Together, they're a lot more personally important than that in Bogus Journey's case, we have probably my favorite comedy of all time, and to the extent I might be willing to settle down and agree that Excellent Adventure is mostly just a goofy lark, and therefore nothing to get too attached to, that first sequel is downright criminally underrated. Obviously, I recognize that I'm in such a small minority on this that I can only speak for myself, but for me the Bill & Ted duology-comprising Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure from 1989 and its sequel, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, from 1991-isn't just a pair of fun crypto-stoner comedies to be recalled with nostalgic fondness.
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