Review of Time Bandits (1981) by Ben B — 12 Aug 2011

Terry Gilliam's favorite combination of whimsy and menace works better in "Time Bandits" than in any of his other films, achieving an excellent balance between a magical world from a child's point of view with more than a hint of deviousness intruding on the fantasy. Unfortunately, Gilliam's biggest weakness returns yet again to undermine the picture: pathological style over substance.

Kevin (Craig Warnock) is a young boy dissatisfied with the humdrum, uninspired home life his materialistic, braindead parents have created for the family in a drab suburb. He's released from his soul-sucking, even abusive domestic situation, though, when a pack of ornery dwarves break into his bedroom from a dreamlike land and takes him along on a journey hopping through time, hunting down artifacts; meeting skewed versions of historical personalities; and evading the sinister designs of Evil itself (David Warner), who hopes to attain the adventurous little guys' magic map and supplant the place of God.

The unsung hero of "Bandits" is the director's fellow Monty Python alumnus Michael Palin, who appears in several tangential but amusing scenes while also collaborating with Gilliam on the script. Given that Palin's work with Python was far, far more grounded in narrative than Gilliam's -- specializing in surreal animated segues more than anything with a modicum of continuity -- he should probably be thanked for the coherence of the screenplay (a rare trait for a Gilliam film; most writers seem far too willing to play to the filmmaker's weaknesses).

That said, this is still a frequently dodgy movie. For every Robin Hood (John Cleese; a sequence in which the bandit folk hero is reimagined as a platitude-mouthing politician barely qualified to hold a city council seat) and Agamemnon (Sean Connery displaying his paternal side in several legitimately touching moment with Warnock), there's at least another, if not two, scenes which simply hinder the plot and allow Gilliam to squeeze in another poorly focused tangent. These include an utterly pointless ride on the head of a stoic giant (Ian Muir) and an overlong sequence involving a neurotic ogre (Peter Vaughan) and his more traditionally bloodthirsty wife (Katherine Helmond) which is barely chuckle-worthy at best.

And really, did we need yet another film which makes a prolonged joke about Napoleon (Ian Holm) and the insecurities he might have felt about his diminutive stature? Every person who acclaims Gilliam as one of the most creative filmmakers working today should be made to watch that scene in isolation; "Histeria!" found better jokes parodying the classic hand-in-shirt pose adopted by the emperor and other contemporaneous military officials.