Box office ''Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure'' had its theatrical release on February 17, 1989
Critical response On
Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 83% based on 58 reviews, with an average rating of 6.90/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are just charming, goofy, and silly enough to make this fluffy time-travel
Adventure work". On
Metacritic, the film holds a weighted average score of 50 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.
The Washington Post gave the film a negative review, finding the script written by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon as "made only the sketchiest attempts to draw their historical characters. They exist as foils and nothing else, and the gags that are hung on them are far from first-rate", and that if director "Stephen Herek, has any talent for comedy, it's not visible here. More than anything, the picture looks paltry and undernourished."
Variety wrote about each historical figure that Bill & Ted meet, stating that "Each encounter is so brief and utterly cliched that history has little chance to contribute anything to this pic's two dimensions."
Vincent Canby of
The New York Times referred to the film as a "painfully inept comedy" and that the "one dimly interesting thing about ''Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
is the way the two teen-age heroes communicate in superlatives. We are about to fail most egregiously,'' says Ted to Bill, or maybe it's Bill to Ted. They are also fond of odd words, such as bodacious." In the
Los Angeles Times, Chris Willman was also unimpressed, concluding: "Make no mistake, ''Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure'' [...] is not a satire of mindlessness; it's unabashed glorification of dumbness for dumbness' sake. Bill and Ted are heroic in their ability to reduce some of history's great minds to their level." The successes of the film and the animated series spawned a short-lived breakfast cereal called
Bill & Ted's Excellent Cereal. A phone booth used in the sequel was given away in a contest presented by
Nintendo Power magazine, to promote ''Bill & Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure''. It was won by Kenneth Grayson of Mississippi. In 2010, the city of San Dimas celebrated 50 years of incorporation. The celebration's slogan was
San Dimas, 1960–2010 – An Excellent Adventure. ''Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure'' was selected as number 8 in
Rolling Stone's '10 Best Stoner Movies of All Time' in 2013. Writing in
The Guardian on the occasion of the film's 25th anniversary,
Hadley Freeman found: "Of all the delightfully improbable scenarios depicted in ''Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure'' – from Napoleon Bonaparte causing havoc on a waterslide to Billy the Kid and Socrates (a.k.a. "So-crayts", of course) picking up chicks in a California mall to George Carlin acting in a film alongside Keanu Reeves and a member of the Go-Go's – none would have seemed more unlikely on its release than the idea that one day, with much media fanfare, the public would be celebrating the film's 25th anniversary. By the time ''Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
was released in 1989, the 80s teen film explosion was starting to taper out. [...] Moreover, there had already been plenty of films about time-travelling teens by the time Bill & Ted
rocked up in cinemas, such as Peggy Sue Got Married and Back to the Future''. Few who were around then would have bet that a goofy movie about a pair of California metalheads skipping back through time in a phonebox collecting historical characters to bring back to 20th-century California for their history report would still be remembered today. But I am very much among those few".
In cultural analysis Writing in British Sunday newspaper
The Observer,
Tom Holland noted, ''Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure'' does not tend to be rated as one of cinema's profounder treatments of the relationship between present and past. The story of two Californian slackers with a time machine who, for complicated reasons, have to assemble assorted celebrities from history in order to pass a high-school project, it is chiefly remembered for bringing Keanu Reeves to the attention of a mass audience. Classicists, however, will always cherish it as the only film ever to combine the music of Van Halen with Greek philosophy. When Bill and Ted embark on their quest, what should be their first destination if not classical Athens, and who should be the very first 'historical dude' bundled into their time machine if not a bald-headed man in a sheet whom they persist in calling 'Soh-kraytz'?"
(Holland inaccurately names Socrates as the first historical figure Bill and Ted encounter, when it is actually Napoleon Bonaparte.) Holland continued: Even to metalheads, then, the philosophy of ancient Greece serves as something that is both primal and emblematic of civilisation as a whole. Socrates, in particular, the 'lover of wisdom' who insisted that the most fundamental presumptions of his countrymen should be subjected to experimental investigation, and who ended up being made to drink hemlock for his pains, has always been admired as the very fountainhead of rationalism. Yet when it comes to identifying what he taught and believed, there is a problem, on which ''Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure'', rather unexpectedly, puts its finger. Socrates, transplanted to 1980s California, can only communicate with his abductors by gesturing and gurning – since Bill and Ted, it goes without saying, speak not a word of ancient Greek. Even the miracle of time travel, it appears, cannot serve to alter what is, for any historian, a most awkward fact: that it is impossible to be certain of what Socrates actually said. Davidson described being impressed at the authenticity of the costuming of the scenes set in Beethoven's time, after seeing the movie. Since even the background characters in those scenes were wearing quite authentic costumes, it seemed to her like an accessible and accurate measuring stick for the quality of period authentic costumes in movies. According to Davidson, "If a production's main costumes are less well done than those of the extras in a minor part of a 1980s teen comedy movie, we have a problem." ==Soundtrack==