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Matheson & Solomon’s screenplay is a model for transforming an archetypal unnecessary sequel into a wealth of invention and comic riches. If anything, it’s even smarter about its stupidity, allowing for Bill & Ted to remain, unapologetically, defiantly themselves (“We got totally lied to by our album covers” Bill observes after he and Ted wind up in Hell) even while waxing philosophical and engaging God on a metaphysical level in an attempt to let them go to back to earth and get revenge on the “evil metal dickweeds” who killed them. If it bogs down towards the climax, when wrongs must be righted, evil revolutionaries from 700 years in the future must be foiled, and the duo’s music - which seems to be ZZ Top meets Dogstar - must be unleashed on the world, it takes its sweet time getting to the predictable payoff.

Hewitt, as visually stylish as befits a former music video director, makes good use of the film’s modest budget, staging laughs simply from the design of certain sequences (Heaven seems inspired by late 1980s Prince music videos and album covers, Bill & Ted’s plummeting to Hell is an ingenious use of no background) and pulls deliciously self-mocking performances from stars Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, who must have relished the opportunity to play heroic dumb and evil dumb, sometimes in the same shot. Veteran character actor William Sadler is a hoot as Death, playing him as a hapless Germanic putz, an acting decision bold and giggle-inducing enough to carry one past the realization that once the film puts Death on the same side as our heroes, it never quite finds anything as novel for him to do as the moment when he is forced to concede board game victory - “You haff sunk my Battlesheep.”

Case Study #3: Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (2007)

Tagline: This time, they’re running from the joint.

I probably wouldn’t have checked out Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle if not for Stephanie Zacharek’s glowing review on Salon when it came out. Another dude comedy about dimwits from the director of Dude, Where’s My Car? With the former Doogie Howser M.D. cameoing as “himself”? Thanks, but no thanks. Even with high praise from someone whose opinion I respected, I still took my sweet time getting to it, opting for rental about seven months after the fact. Since I am one who has no trouble with issuing changes of opinion, let me make the same pitch:

If you are holding out on seeing it, stop. It is one of the brighter spots in American comedy in the last decade, a portrait of a cheerfully vulgar and scatological sub-universe (i.e. suburban New Jersey, where I was born once upon a time): a place in which one discovers that those really hot chicks you’re about to bang enjoy playing a rousing game of “Battleshits” on the crapper, where extreme sports douchebags who travel around in their over-compensating behemoth truck apparently have a soft spot for classic Wilson Phillips tunes, where getting an escaped cheetah stoned out of its feline mind may be the smartest (and dumbest) way out of a tight situation, and where it is not out of the realm of possibility to encounter Neil Patrick Harris commandeering a stolen vehicle and snorting blow off a hooker’s ass.

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