Bill & Ted, 40ish, Return for Another Excellent Adventure

For those who haven’t seen Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure or its lesser sequel, it follows ditzy BFFs Bill and Ted (Keanu Reeves) through an inspired journey through time in order to pass their high school history class. Their time machine is a tiny phone booth and as they travel through history, they pick up a few celebrities to help them with their schoolwork, among them Napoleon, Billy the Kid, Socrates, and Joan of Arc, played by Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Gos. The original movie is so quintessentially 1989, down to the costumes (Keanu wears a vest and ties a sweatshirt around his waist) and the post-Valley Girl slang (Bogus! Excellent!). It was also Keanu Reeves’ breakout role which explains most of his career going forward. A third installment mayyyybe sounds like a bad look on paper, but also it’s worth making simply because we now have fancy futuristic filmmaking tricks like CGI. The possibilities are endless. (Hologram George Carlin?)

“The conceit is really funny,” Winter told Yahoo. “What if you’re middle-aged, haven’t really grown up and you’re supposed to have saved the world and maybe, just maybe, you kinda haven’t?”

Said conceit makes sense for our hapless heroes, whose smart-dumb, philosophical airhead steez initially made the series so funny. But it also evokes the fear that it might try to capitalize on the spate of post-Apatow films about middle-aged dudes who don’t wanna grow up and don’t have to because of their easy middle-class white man lives (and the naggy women who do things for them). Maybe Bill and Ted can get Susan B. Anthony up in the phone booth? One can hope.