718. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, George Carlin

Director: Stephen Herek

Running Time: 90 mins

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is an American film about two seemingly idiotic teenagers who, on the brink of flunking their history project, end up travelling through time to pick up tips on for their project.

You’ve got to love this film! Not only is it a fantastically fun, simple and seemingly innocent movie, but it’s also got a whole heap of interesting history to it that, while being an enjoyable learning experience, doesn’t feel at all patronising, so in fact you come out of this with both a huge smile on your face and a bit more historical knowledge.

Now, I don’t really know whether the brief for this film was a sort of ‘let’s make learning fun’ thing, but, while being extremely entertaining, it does really work in teaching the history of it all without seeming like a junior school documentary. (Now I know whenabouts Sigmund Freud was around (turn of the century), and when Napoleon invaded Austria (1805).)

So, you can see that this something a little more than a stupid comedy, and on the face of things, that’s really all that you’ve got to think about, because the whole madly idiotic comedy is so easy-going and fun to watch.

Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter’s weirdly endearing performances as dunderheads Bill and Ted (who basically seem exactly like the main characters in Wayne’s World, in fact now that I’ve seen this, Wayne’s World feels like a bit of a copy) are just so fun to watch, while all of the supporting characters playing wacky versions of historical figures are also hilarious to see, with performances that aren’t in any way irritating, but just hugely entertaining.

And even if you’re not into the whole time travel thing, or even history, you can just watch this as one of the weirdest kids’ movies of all time, that has no real plot as such, and is just a bit of a jolly through the ages, so that’s why this gets a 7.9.