Review of Time Bandits (1981) by Steven M — 12 Nov 2012

Time Bandits, Terry Gilliam's answer to The Wizard of Oz, is of course a kids' movie, but its subversive slapstick works just as well for adults. Of Gilliam's post-Monty-Python films, it's the most Pythonesque of all, in considerable part no doubt because its script was co-written by fellow Python alumnus Michael Palin. In long stretches, though it seems less like Monty Python and more like Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure as Mel Brooks might have written and directed it, which is to say another brand of adult-friendly goofy cleverness.

I was interested to see how many of the gags, bits and even physical architecture from Time Bandits were recapitulated and expanded in Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus three decades later. To cite a few (and if you've seen one or the other of these movies you will know the references), the swinging rope trick, the giant stone staircase, and the fantastical giant building connected to the world only by a precarious ribbonlike bridge. Even Dr. Parnassus's imaginarium itself is an oversized elaboration of the Punch & Judy box that so amused Napoleon in Time Bandits.

At the end, the movie waivers a bit, and the final set piece, a drawn-out battle with the devil, goes on too long, but the ride that takes us to it is highly entertaining. So too is the grisly fate in the very last scene of young Kevin's muggle parents.