Time Bandits Review
The first two episodes of Time Bandits are now streaming on Apple TV+. Two new episodes stream every Wednesday through August 21.
Apologies for spoiling a 43-year-old movie, but it’s still pretty wild that Terry Gilliam got away with making a supposedly family-friendly adventure that ends with a little boy watching his parents get zapped out of existence. That’s the mordant, morbid punchline of Time Bandits, the Monty Python veteran’s 1981 comic fantasy about a band of chronologically unmoored thieves and the preteen history buff who joins them on their plunder across the millenia. By vaporizing Mom and Dad right before the credits, Gilliam played to the anarchic daydreams of his young audience (what kid hasn’t fantasized a little about getting rid of their folks?) at the expense of sensitive kids and overprotective guardians alike. The last scene looks even more audacious today. Watching it is like peeking through a tear in the spacetime continuum to an edgier era for all-ages fun.
The parents get nuked again in the new TV remake of Time Bandits premiering this week on Apple TV+. But their date with oblivion, caused by an ornery demon who leaves two lumps of smoking coal where they used to be, arrives not at the end of the story but rather towards the very beginning. It’s not a sick parting joke, left bleakly unresolved. This time, blowing up the ’rents is an inciting incident – an unfortunate mishap little Kevin (Kal-El Tuck) will spend the remainder of this 10-episode season trying to reverse. Call that the first sign that Time Bandits has been tamed for the small screen and a new generation.
There are still traces here of Gilliam, and the way he blended Pythonesque silliness with a rather Douglas Adams approach to sci-fi satire. The setup is the same, with Kevin whisked across history after a portal opens up in his bedroom closet, depositing the title collective of motley criminals. But the spirit of the material has been filtered through the softly ironic sensibilities of the show’s venerated creative team: Kiwi funnymen Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement, a.k.a. the comic brains behind What We Do in the Shadows, and Iain Morris, the like-minded British creator of The Inbetweeners.
The Time Bandits themselves are cuddlier (and taller) than the grungy, amoral dwarfs we met in the movie. Lisa Kudrow, in her first lead TV role since Web Therapy, plays their quasi-leader, Penelope – quasi because she alternates between enjoying being in charge and abdicating responsibility by insisting everyone’s equal. Her fellow travelers through space and time are Widgit (Roger Jean Nsengiyumva), neurotic navigator and tech support; anti-social, self-proclaimed empath Judy (Charlyne Yi); kooky aspiring actor Alto (Tadhg Murphy); and dim, sweet strong man Bittelig (Rune Temte). There’s not a first-rate character among them. Kudrow, whose performance here lands closer to Chandler than Phoebe on the Friends color wheel of personality types, sets the comic tone with her dry underreactions, which clash mildly with Kevin’s wide-eyed curiosity.
At least Time Bandits is more amenable to small-screen translation than other cult classics of its era. The structure was already episodic, after all. Outrunning the forces of light and darkness – both of which want to get their celestial mitts on the stolen, magical map guiding our heroes across the timeline – Kevin and the Bandits keep dropping into different centuries, their adventure stretching from the Ice Age to ancient Troy to the heyday of Jamiroquai, not necessarily in that order. Swapping settings with each episode keeps things lively enough, allowing for some inspired guest spots (like Sherlock’s Mark Gatiss as a haughty Earl of Sandwich and Hammed Animashaun as a thoughtful Mansa Musa). Apple clearly spent an arm and a leg on the series, judging from the solid effects that bring prehistoric creatures, hellspawn, and vast ancient kingdoms to life. Not that the relatively high production values totally dispel the Wishbone vibes.
It’s no surprise that this creative team would lean on the fish-out-of-water comedic possibilities of chronological nomads. The Bandits, like the vampire roomies of What We Do in the Shadows, are products of a different world, though they’re both behind and ahead of the times as needed – discussing the challenges of “glass ceilings” for female leaders with a Mayan ruler, failing to recognize either jazz or the value of dollar bills during the Harlem Renaissance. Broad anachronisms abound: There’s a whole episode where Kevin’s lost-in-time sister (Kiera Thompson) has taught cavemen how to say “YOLO.” Waititi’s influential brand of gently clueless goofball banter is on full display, and gets laughs out of a few exchanges. (Supposed empath Judy: “You’re sad.” Kevin: “This is the happiest day of my life.” Judy: “I’m new at this.”) Naturally, the writer-director casts himself as God – a Supreme Being who runs the universe like a cocky CEO. Meanwhile, Clement is his opposite number, Pure Evil, doing deadpan bad-boss schtick against a fiery green-screen backdrop.
Time Bandits has been tamed for the small screen and a new generation.
The pricklier wit of Gilliam’s century-hopping fantasy is sorely missed. This Time Bandits is wholesome to a fault, a sitcom adventure in the group-hug spirit of Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit. The Bandits are conveniently incompetent robbers, never walking away with much of a bounty, or even particularly invested in stealing – a relief for Kevin, and for any parent worried their offspring might take the wrong lesson. The show can’t even reality commit to the indifference and irritation the Bandits are initially meant to feel towards their adolescent tagalong; their insults are forced, their hostility canned. And while it’s nice to see the writers pushing back against historical stereotypes (an admirable goal of a series aimed at least nominally at impressionable kids), their politics are often better than their jokes: One episode plays like a very long setup to the predictable punchline that not all cultures believed to practice human sacrifice really did so.
The impression is of a show determined not to upset anyone, young or old. Gilliam supposedly had to fight to keep his wickedly downbeat ending. Waititi, Clement, and Morris either lost their own fights or never presented anything to which the suits at Apple could object. Will Kevin manage to stop his parents from being erased forever? Put it this way: Even the demon goons of Clement’s testy dark lord survive his impatient bolts of hellfire. You don’t need a wrinkle in spacetime to return to an age when family entertainment still dared to dabble in darkness and risk nightmares. Just put on the original Time Bandits.
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