Taika Waititi’s ‘Time Bandits’ Makes Hours Feel Like Days
In 1981, as the Monty Python sketch comedy troupe approached the end of its most fertile period, Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin co-wrote the feature film Time Bandits, which Gilliam also directed. Though Monty Python’s Flying Circus and some segments of their various movies would be entertaining to kids and adults alike, Time Bandits was pitched at a younger audience and, according to an essay by Bruce Eder at Criterion.com, became “the most critically well-received children’s film in nearly two decades.”
For some Gen Xers who saw it as children, Time Bandits was a formative event: a fantasy story that didn’t hold back on physical or emotional violence, and (spoilers ahead for a 40+-year-old movie) had no compunction about giving the young protagonist’s terrible parents an unambiguously punitive ending.
Now Time Bandits is getting a revival in streaming TV series form. I can’t speak to how 2024 kids will receive it, but if the idea is that the parents on whom the movie imprinted should watch along with the show and love it as much as they did its progenitor, I don’t think it’s hit the mark.
Don't Miss
Broadly, the series — which drops the first two of its season’s 10 episodes on AppleTV+ tomorrow — has the same premise as the movie. A preteen history nerd named Kevin (here played by Kal-El Tuck) is at home in bed when a group of eccentric strangers calling themselves Time Bandits burst into his room through his wardrobe. They’ve stolen a supernaturally powerful map from the Supreme Being they work for, and are using it to travel through time and space to steal valuables.
Kevin gets pulled along to their next stop, and quickly makes himself useful by sharing what he knows about the places the Time Bandits accidentally land, often in the course of fleeing the Supreme Being yelling at them to return the map. But the Supreme Being’s not the only one who wants it: His opposite number, credited on IMDb as “Wrongness” (Jemaine Clement), seeks it too, and — departing from the original — sends a supernatural huntress named Fianna (Rachel House) to chase the Time Bandits through time to get it. Other departures from the film: The Bandits aren’t played by little people; Kevin has a younger sister, Saffron (Kiera Thompson); and Kevin and Saffron’s parents experience collateral damage from Kevin’s adventuring, supplying him with a quest to drive him through most of the season. The series was co-created by Clement, his frequent collaborator Taika Waititi and Iain Morris, who co-created The Inbetweeneers, and who joined Waititi in co-writing Next Goal Wins, the last feature film Waititi directed.
Watching the movie again last week for the first time since I was a kid, I could understand why the people behind the remake thought it would lend itself to a series treatment. It’s highly episodic, with the story more or less resetting with each journey through time. The show, therefore, can easily just end one episode with a trip through a time portal and resume, in the next, with a whole new setting. That the show comes from two creators of color also lets it widen its scope in ways Palin and Gilliam might not have thought of given the unconscious bias white Baby Boomers often evince. For instance, rather than sticking with the movie’s well-known figures of European history and legend, like Napoleon and Robin Hood, we visit North Africa so that Kevin can meet Mansa Musa; Harlem during Prohibition and its Renaissance; and the early 19th century, where they end up on a pirate ship with Ching Shih, China’s pirate queen.
The last of these offers the loudest echo of Waititi’s most recent TV work — the show he most recently produced, on Max, was Our Flag Means Death, a retelling of the life of “gentleman pirate” Stede Bonnet — but even when our central crew isn’t sailing the seas, the intentional anachronism that animated Flag is apparent here too. Case in point: The Bandits end up at the Great Wall of China in the early days of its construction; when Kevin tells Qin Shi Huang that the Wall will eventually comprise four million bricks and take 2,000 years to complete, the emperor groans that his builders told him it would only be four months, and Bandit Bittelig (Rune Temte) commiserates that it is hard to find good contractors.
In addition to flashes of the wit we’ve come to expect from all three co-creators, we see several Waititi repertory players: the aforementioned House; Mike Minogue and Karen O’Leary, of Wellington Paranormal; Jonny Brugh, the third lead of the What We Do in the Shadows film; Flag’s Con O’Neill; and more I won’t spoil. The spirit of the film — madcap yet erudite, and unusually edgy for children’s entertainment — shines through, yet also feels like it’s been refreshed for a contemporary audience.
Unfortunately, the show’s deficits far outnumber its strengths. These Time Bandits — led, despite her denials that the group has a leader, by Penelope (Lisa Kudrow) — are somewhat illegible. They look like adults, and in one case formerly had a fiancé, but they sometimes follow kid logic (in any of their heists, for example) when they’re not displaying an understanding of the world that seems closer to infantile (finding themselves on a pirate ship Penelope describes as “a wobbly room with no walls”). I suppose I can imagine that a kid who often bickers with his sibling would like to see himself represented on screen doing so as pointlessly and repetitively as Kevin and Saffron do, but it was as grating for me as it probably will be for that hypothetical kid’s parents.
Speaking of pointless and repetitive: the gag that no one can get Kevin’s name right, which recurs multiple times through the season, often multiple times in each episode. And parents who are excited to introduce their children to this property because they remember the movie’s legitimately horrific ending may be disappointed that the new Kevin’s parents have had a glow-up from the original’s. Whereas the movie introduced a couple of truly negligent monsters, the show’s Mum and Dad are merely baffled by Kevin’s geeky interests and too into their phones. So, be warned: If you were shocked by the movie as a kid and hoped to give your own children the same experience, the Time Bandits show dials the nihilism way down.
The good news is, the movie still exists for anyone looking to inflict psychic damage on Generation Alpha’s delicate minds, and as of this writing, it’s streaming on Max. You may prefer your golden memories to the reality of how the Time Bandits movie plays for you today, though: It might be a lot longer, duller and uglier than you remember. The show, at least, is brighter and more hopeful than the movie that inspired it; it’s also orders of magnitude slower.
The promise of a new, historically-minded Taika Waititi comedy series might lead you to sample Time Bandits, no matter what I write. When the actual show lets you down, you can escape it with the touch of a button — no mystical map required. Maybe just click over to an intermittently disturbing ‘80s fantasy title that has held up: Peacock has Labyrinth on offer.
