While this is a film Terry Gilliam's many fans no doubt enjoy, few honest ones would classify "Time Bandits" as among his best films. With "Brazil" or the lost '80s classic "The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen" you get vision, story, and humor. Here you just get vision.
"Time Bandits" has a great concept at least: Little Kevin (Craig Warnock) lives with his uncaring parents in a house stocked with modern conveniences, daydreaming of ancient Greece. Suddenly out of his bedroom closet, Narnia-style, pop six tiny men, escapees from the Supreme Being, carrying with them a map identifying wormholes through time. One step ahead of the Creator, under the baleful eye of Evil, the six sweep Kevin across history in search of plunder.
There are solid aspects to "Time Bandits," especially the performance of David Rappaport as Randall, leader of the bandit gang. More than any other actor in the film, he presents a comic lightness, whether strung up upside-down and trying to impress his captor by snarling at him ("They always crack in the end") or dog-paddling in the North Atlantic after landing his gang on the Titanic. ("It didn't say 'Get off before the iceberg' on the ticket.')
David Warner also has moments as the sinister face of Evil, less as the figure of menace he presents in the second half of the film than the goofy, insecure techno-loving whiner early on. "If I were creating a world, I wouldn't mess about with butterflies or daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o'clock, day one."
What isn't nearly as funny are the many time periods Kevin and his little friends find themselves in. Whether meeting a patronizing Robin Hood or a Napoleon who gets his kicks watching tiny people hit each other, these bits consistently disappoint as comedy and create nothing tangible in the way of a plot. They are just an excuse for Monty Python vets Gilliam and Michael Palin to string together a group of unconnected sketches like they did in the old days.
Except these sketches aren't funny, not even with Palin and fellow Python John Cleese on hand in cameo roles. Cleese carries his one joke playing Robin Hood as snobby nobleman just long enough for it to get tired, while Palin overacts shamefully as a lovelorn fellow chasing Shelley Duvall across time and forever getting crossed up. Given Cleese and Palin were the two funniest Pythons, this is disappointing.
So too is the second half of the film, where Gilliam and Palin lose the tiny thread of their story and decide to move the action into a more mystical realm, sending Kevin and the gang to "The Time Of Legends." Here the story and special effects become even more threadbare, while the comedy is limited to a giant with a bad back who says he feels "horrible" when he feels great and vice versa.
SPOILER AHEAD-- The most entertaining thing about reading the comments here are how the many champions of "Time Bandits" justify the film's mercilessly mean ending. Gilliam may talk today about his message being not to trust heroes, but there's nothing about heroes in the ending, just a small boy alone and orphaned in the world, victim of an uncaring cosmos. My belief is Gilliam stuck it in precisely because it went against the grain of his movie, and showed he wasn't getting soft. No sentimentalist he. --SPOILER END
The one sequence of the film I enjoyed most is the one time Gilliam gets a bit sentimental, when Kevin gets stranded alone in Mycenae and meets Agamemnon in the person of Sean Connery. Connery's star power was never brighter, and Gilliam gets the maximum value from his Morocco set. It's not funny, but no jokes are better than the weak ones scattered across the rest of the picture. At least here Gilliam is trying to create a story.
It quickly passes, and so does everything else, including the time you spend watching this. It leaves a hollow feeling, proving if nothing else this film is aptly named.
"Time Bandits" has a great concept at least: Little Kevin (Craig Warnock) lives with his uncaring parents in a house stocked with modern conveniences, daydreaming of ancient Greece. Suddenly out of his bedroom closet, Narnia-style, pop six tiny men, escapees from the Supreme Being, carrying with them a map identifying wormholes through time. One step ahead of the Creator, under the baleful eye of Evil, the six sweep Kevin across history in search of plunder.
There are solid aspects to "Time Bandits," especially the performance of David Rappaport as Randall, leader of the bandit gang. More than any other actor in the film, he presents a comic lightness, whether strung up upside-down and trying to impress his captor by snarling at him ("They always crack in the end") or dog-paddling in the North Atlantic after landing his gang on the Titanic. ("It didn't say 'Get off before the iceberg' on the ticket.')
David Warner also has moments as the sinister face of Evil, less as the figure of menace he presents in the second half of the film than the goofy, insecure techno-loving whiner early on. "If I were creating a world, I wouldn't mess about with butterflies or daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o'clock, day one."
What isn't nearly as funny are the many time periods Kevin and his little friends find themselves in. Whether meeting a patronizing Robin Hood or a Napoleon who gets his kicks watching tiny people hit each other, these bits consistently disappoint as comedy and create nothing tangible in the way of a plot. They are just an excuse for Monty Python vets Gilliam and Michael Palin to string together a group of unconnected sketches like they did in the old days.
Except these sketches aren't funny, not even with Palin and fellow Python John Cleese on hand in cameo roles. Cleese carries his one joke playing Robin Hood as snobby nobleman just long enough for it to get tired, while Palin overacts shamefully as a lovelorn fellow chasing Shelley Duvall across time and forever getting crossed up. Given Cleese and Palin were the two funniest Pythons, this is disappointing.
So too is the second half of the film, where Gilliam and Palin lose the tiny thread of their story and decide to move the action into a more mystical realm, sending Kevin and the gang to "The Time Of Legends." Here the story and special effects become even more threadbare, while the comedy is limited to a giant with a bad back who says he feels "horrible" when he feels great and vice versa.
SPOILER AHEAD-- The most entertaining thing about reading the comments here are how the many champions of "Time Bandits" justify the film's mercilessly mean ending. Gilliam may talk today about his message being not to trust heroes, but there's nothing about heroes in the ending, just a small boy alone and orphaned in the world, victim of an uncaring cosmos. My belief is Gilliam stuck it in precisely because it went against the grain of his movie, and showed he wasn't getting soft. No sentimentalist he. --SPOILER END
The one sequence of the film I enjoyed most is the one time Gilliam gets a bit sentimental, when Kevin gets stranded alone in Mycenae and meets Agamemnon in the person of Sean Connery. Connery's star power was never brighter, and Gilliam gets the maximum value from his Morocco set. It's not funny, but no jokes are better than the weak ones scattered across the rest of the picture. At least here Gilliam is trying to create a story.
It quickly passes, and so does everything else, including the time you spend watching this. It leaves a hollow feeling, proving if nothing else this film is aptly named.