Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure - ****

"Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure" may have been outgrossed in 1989 by films such as "See No Evil, Hear No Evil" and "Uncle Buck", but 15 years later, who really remembers those movies? In the case of anything involving "Bill and Ted", that has never been a problem. These two characters are Wayne and Garth before Wayne and Garth were cool, and the writing is a lot better. Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter star as Ted Logan and Bill S Preston Esq, two "nothing going" teenagers whose dreams of rock and roll stardom are threatened when Ted's father threatens to send him to military camp in Alaska if he and Bill don't get A pluses on a History presentation. Luckily for them, they are given help in the form of George Carlin's Rufus, a man of the future who lends his time travelling phone booth to the boys to go back and gather the necessary historical figures to properly do the assignment. This film is a wildy funny comedy which succeeds on multiple levels. First, it's entirely watchable as a one dimensional slapstick. The characters are so off the wall and the two main characters are so well portrayed that the jokes don't strain at all, even when they're repeated several times over. If you choose instead to look for something more, the film is also effective as a biting satire of so many off the wall slapsticks before it. The logic errors in the movie are presented in a way that makes light of the industry more than the quality of the film itself, and are presented with such blatancy that it would be foolish to suggest they're accidental. It is all too appropriate that Keanu Reeves' best performance should come out of a movie that requires so little. Thumbs up.