The fish-out-of-water comedy has always been the lowest of the low on the hierarchy of comedic respectability. Whether it’s a street-smart urbanite sent back to medieval times (“Black Knight”) or a rustic Aussie perplexed by a bidet (“Crocodile Dundee”), these movies are generally (and rightfully) banished to the deepest, darkest recesses of both the public consciousness and video-store shelves.
Guy Pearce’s “The Time Machine” strives more for the Jerry Bruckheimer type of absurdity (that of CGI bombast) than for the Keanu kind, so it’s excused. But usually, the only salvation for a film in this genre lies in the desperate hope that it is so ludicrous that it can only be interpreted by audiences as tongue-in-cheek, popcorn-movie camp.
Such was the case with the now-ubiquitous “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” a movie that, along with “The Big Lebowski” and “Office Space,” has become an inextricable part of weekend lore on college campuses everywhere thanks in large part to cable reruns and DVD accessibility.
The film is so much more than a light-hearted romp through the pages of history, though. It is a thesis on the moral conundrums facing man’s manipulation of the space-time continuum; an exploration of the psychological profundities facing a teenager with a severe Oedipal complex; a refreshing character-study of some of history’s most influential figures. Ok, maybe not all that, but it does feature one of the greatest thinkers of the ancient world calling the father of modern psychology a “geek.”
Right from an opening scene in which a high school teacher informs Bill (Alex Winter, “The Lost Boys”) and Ted (Keanu Reeves, “The Matrix”) that all they’ve learned in class is “that Caesar is a ‘salad dressing dude,'” the movie demands to be taken with a grain of salt. Bill and Ted are faced with the unpleasant prospect of failing history, a situation that has dire consequences for the duo unless they make the most bodacious of all class presentations.
Enter Rufus (George Carlin, “Dogma”), a futuristic deus ex machina sent to help Bill and Ted in order to set them on the path to rock stardom. With the touch of a couple of buttons, they’re on their way through the circuits of history to kidnap Billy the Kid, Socrates, Joan of Arc, Sigmund Freud, Napoleon, Ludwig van Beethoven, Genghis Kahn, and Abraham Lincoln. Not only do Bill and Ted have an excellent adventure, but they also save the future of the human race, all the while teaching us the importance of doing well in school.
One of the funnier subtleties of the film is that it takes the fish-out-of-water conventions in both directions — Bill and Ted are just as out of place in ancient Greece and 19th-century Germany as Genghis Kahn and Beethoven are in a shopping mall.
With a plethora of puns and gags ranging from shrewd (Napoleon’s petulance being highlighted by the fact that Ted’s teenaged brother has to baby-sit him) to just plain old absurd (Billy the Kid and Socrates bond over a Nerf football outside of a phone booth in medieval England), “Adventure” induces a belly-laugh from even the history-inclined.
If H.G. Wells wrote the book on time travel, then Bill and Ted probably never read it. Anyway, it’s much better to take a trip through time with a couple of dudes who call themselves the Wyld Stallyns as your tour guides.
