Best Keanu: “J-7.”

It’s tempting to bring Bogus Journey down a notch from Excellent Adventure, and down say two notches from Face the Music and give it four starts out of five, but the sequence where Bill and Ted battle Death is so funny, it earns 1/2 star all on its own.

(Apparently my star-rating has some rubric after all. I am thinking about rubric now, late on a July evening in 2023, because I am gritting my teeth through an Intro to Ethics class and tonight I made the mistake of asking in the online chat if the TAs couldn’t give us a breakdown of our mark with reference to the rubric in our next take home exam. To me, that was a reasonable enough request; my prof, who has a knack for making me cry, said the TAs were not obligated to give a breakdown and that the rubric was just an estimate. Now, you may wonder, why am I gritting my teeth through this horrible class when I hate ethics — or specifically, how ethics is taught in university Philosophy classes — so much so that the entire experience makes me feel miserable and want to cry. Because I am required to take Intro to Ethics to get the Philosophy major for my current degree, and I’ve put it off as long as I can. It is literally the only Philosophy course I have left to take. For more ramblings on my recent educational pursuits, please see my post on Replicas. While you’re at it, why don’t you sit down and watch Replicas. Because even a bad-good Keanu movie is still a Keanu movie, and it’s almost guaranteed to lift your mood in one way or another.)

After Bill and Ted, who have been killed by evil robot versions of themselves from the future — the “fag” joke returns here, when one of the Bill and Teds says, facing death, that they love them, or some such thing, and the evil robots call them “fags!” and push them off a high rock to their demise — experience their own personal hell, they decide to take up Death’s offer (of sorts) to beat him in a contest so they might get their lives back.

There’s a dramatic segue, and then the trio is revealed to be seated at opposite ends of a long stone table, both hunched over Battleship. Bill and Ted win, Death says best two out of three… and so it goes. It’s classic and hilarious.

Most of Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey is just plain weird, and not always the good kind of weird. It’s a harder sell than Excellent Adventure because we already know Bill and Ted, so there’s little humor in them being, well, Bill and Ted all over again. There’s a mish-mash of silly scenarios, there’s a supervillain. It thankfully only runs an hour and a half.

There are new actors playing Bill and Ted’s better halves, Elizabeth and Joanna (and in Face the Music there will be new actors yet again). There’s a few notable cameos: Pam Grier and the guy from Faith No More. (Faith No More is a good 80s memory. I wore out that cassette tape in my youth).

All in all, the main reason to watch Bogus Journey is to see Bill and Ted battle death and to fill the gap between Excellent Adventure and Face the Music. Plus, it’s cool to see some super-advanced, low-budget, very-early-90s robot/fake skin/AI technology.

Or something.

I’m back to crying now. Well, not really. I’ve just watched that 6-minute clip of Bill and Ted battle death, so I’m ok.

July 2023