Note: If you haven’s seen 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and its 1991 sequel, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, stop reading now. This 30-years-later cash grab assumes you did and that you remember everything that happened back then (not at all a given). 

Those films got points, a few anyway, for offering educational inspiration to young people by having the title duo of teenage slacker headbangers (Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter) use a time machine to study history.

This time, the pair, now middle-aged with teenage daughters of their own, must time-travel in the other direction and visit their future selves in order to fulfill a prophecy that they would write the greatest-ever pop song and save the world. Or something. To me this mostly meant watching Reeves act badly in a variety of old-person makeup arrangements. 

Any movie advocating an end to the divisiveness that pervades us these days can’t be all bad, even one as forced and superficial as this. It’s upbeat, sincere, big-hearted and every bit as good as the two predecessors (and every bit as bad). (91 min)