Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

Delightfull time-travel comedy. Read full review

There are multiple reasons why Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is such an entertaining movie even now, but the biggest is that Matheson, Solomon, and director Stephen Herek found the perfect Bill and Ted in Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, two young actors with just the right boyish energy. Read full review

The thorough goofiness the film luxuriates in, as compared to the covert self-seriousness of nearly every teen comedy ever made, sets Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure apart and heads and tails above the glut of its ilk. Most triumphant, indeed. Read full review

Also, it is almost squeaky clean. It's rated PG, but without about four seconds of toilet humor and five seconds of bra ogling, Bill and Ted might have faced an insurmountable challenge: the dreaded G rating. [20 Feb 1989, p.D06]

An insanely effective no-brainer of a film, sparkling with a simple charm and energy rarely witnessed this side of illegal substances. Read full review

This is extremely silly, good natured, superficial stuff; a lot depends on whether you take to Bill and Ted's unique lingo (which contorts surfers' expressions) and their gormless behaviour. Read full review

Bill and Ted differ from Spiccoli, their “stoner” predecessor, only in that there are no drug references here to account for their allegedly jocular lack of ambition or interest in education or self-improvement. Read full review

As played by the sublimely dazed Keanu Reeves (Ted) and Alex Winter (Bill), the boys are appealing at first, but their witlessness wears thin quickly. So, too, the movie. Ignorance may indeed be a happy state, but you wouldn't want to live there, and even this short visit seems much, much too long. The film acknowledges its empty-headedness early, when the boys meet Sock-rates. [20 Feb 1989, p.C-6]

It helps if you think of "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" as sort of a "Sesame Street" for teens. Beneath the self-aggrandizing plot, the rock music, the dudespeak and the humor lurks a smattering of knowledge. The premise is spectacularly silly, but harmless. Bill and Ted are a couple of woolly-brained teens who spend so much time dreaming about the rock band they're going to start that they are about to disqualify themselves from a public education. [20 Feb 1989, p.7]

Has an intangibly charming goofiness about it that is somehow endearing: here is a movie about teenagers that contains no excessive profanity, no drug references, and no explicit sexual activity. Read full review

If the director, Stephen Herek, has any talent for comedy, it's not visible here. Read full review

Everything Reeves has done since always has the whiff of "Ted" about it. Party on, dudes. Read full review

Reeves, with his beguilingly blank face and loose-limbed, happy-go-lucky physical vocabulary, and Winter, with his golden curls, gleefully good vibes and 'bodacious' vocabulary, propel this adventure as long as they can. Read full review

Painfully dumb. [21 Feb 1989, p.5D]

Meant to be funny, but it only swells the sinus passages. It is a painfully inept comedy. Read full review

Wow, dudes. Pu-trid. (1989 February 20, p.4D)