When I first heard that there was going to be a third movie in the Bill & Ted “franchise,” I cringed. Hollywood has been awash for years in the lazy, bottom-feeding nostalgia that dredged up Willy Wonka, Point Break, and every attempt to adapt the Fantastic Four to the big screen.

But every once in a while, the studios get one right. Jumanji, for example, was a pleasant surprise when it got updated to the video game era.

It is into this latter, rarer category, that I’d assign Bill & Ted Face the Music. I went in completely skeptical. Alex Winter had faded into relative obscurity, and Keanu Reeves had become Neo, John Wick, and the Cyberpunk 2077 guy. The lovable pair of SoCal dopes from the 80s seemed insurmountably lopsided.

Instead, I was blown away.

B&TFtM is delightfully self-aware. Every criticism a skeptic like me could silently lob at the screen was artfully confronted, sized up, and batted aside with apparent ease. It addressed the in-jokes, the laughability of the entire premise of two garage band rockers changing the world, and how such skewed and flawed individuals would handle decades of apparent failure to live up to their own legend.

The first two movies are oddball classics. They’re silly grin fun with a wacky, hard-not-to-like premise of two incompetent but well-meaning buffoons mucking around with history, the afterlife, and the fate of mankind. The new version—hilarious.

This movie is clearly a labor of love by someone who never let go of these characters. Pulling an A-list star like Keanu back for a repeat performance was a good sign that they’d gotten something special here.