Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)

Thirty years after the original, Bill and Ted return as middle-aged men whose marriages have curdled and whose prophesied song remains unwritten. The film's cultural furniture has been quietly updated. Bill's daughter Thea and Ted's daughter Billie carry the plot's resolution, assembling a supergroup of historical musicians and producing the song that repairs the universe. A woman, Holland Taylor's Great Leader, holds future authority. Kristen Schaal's Kelly does the legwork. The casting is diverse without making a spectacle of its own diversity, which is the more graceful way to do it. The producers also dropped the anti-gay slurs that peppered the earlier installments, a decision that costs the film nothing and spares the audience some squirming.

The historical pageant is where the film's revisionist streak shows. Jimi Hendrix, Louis Armstrong and Mozart are recruited into a band, and Ling Lun, traditionally described as male, is played by a woman, with the filmmakers cheerfully noting that this series has never let accuracy interfere with a good gag. History becomes a jam session. That is a rewrite of the record, but a gentle one, motivated by casting arithmetic and a taste for the absurd. We look in vain for climate anxiety, for a critique of capital, for any meditation on bodies or brains. The threat here is collapsing space-time, not the planet, and the villain is a robot with poor aim.

The result is warm, silly and almost entirely free of sermonizing. It gestures at unity and togetherness, but only in the way a closing number gestures at a curtain. Nobody is scolded. Nobody is taught. The film asks only that we be excellent to each other, a sentiment old enough to be pre-modern and vague enough to offend no one. A pleasant artifact of a gentler comic tradition, and a box office casualty of a year that had other plans.