Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin send a boy through history with six dwarfs and a stolen map, and the result is funny, frightening and built like no other family film. It wanders in the middle and ends with a jolt. We recommend it anyway.
Most children’s films are made by adults who have decided in advance what children can take. Time Bandits was made by Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin, lately of Monty Python, and they seem never to have asked. Their film drops a small boy through his bedroom wall and into history with six dwarfs who have stolen a map from the Supreme Being and mean to rob the past with it. It is funny, it is frightening, and it is built like nothing else in the family section. We recommend it, with one caveat about the middle and another about the end.
Kevin (Craig Warnock) reads about Greek warriors in a house where nobody reads. His parents sit in front of the television comparing their kitchen gadgets with next door’s, and when a knight on horseback crashes out of his wardrobe they do not look up. The next night the dwarfs arrive: Randall (David Rappaport), who gives the orders, Fidgit (Kenny Baker), Og (Mike Edmonds), Strutter (Malcolm Dixon), Vermin (Tiny Ross) and Wally (Jack Purvis). Behind them comes an enormous glowing head, bellowing for its map, and the bedroom wall gives way. We first saw that head as a child and it frightened us badly. Seeing it again, we still felt the jolt, because Gilliam shoots it filling a corridor that has no business being that long, and because nobody in the scene stops to explain it.
Peter Biziou keeps the camera low, at Kevin’s height, and uses lenses wide enough to put ceilings in the frame, so every adult looms and every room feels slightly wrong. Milly Burns’s sets are large and shabby in the right proportions: Kevin’s bedroom is crammed with toys and pictures that pay off later, and the historical stops look lived in rather than tidied for visitors. Julian Doyle cuts between centuries with hard edges. There is no shimmer and no dissolve; one moment it is a battlefield, the next a wood. Trevor Jones and Mike Moran give the thieves a brass march that stays jaunty while the pictures get darker.
The cameos are the film’s party trick and most of them earn their place. Ian Holm’s Napoleon has just taken a town and wants to see a puppet show, and spends dinner listing the great short men of history to a table of dwarfs who are not listening. John Cleese plays Robin Hood as a royal visitor to a factory, shaking hands with the poor and asking whether they are enjoying it. Michael Palin and Shelley Duvall turn up as Vincent and Pansy, a pair of lovers forever interrupted. Sean Connery, as King Agamemnon, is the only adult in the film who looks at Kevin and sees a boy worth talking to. We were more moved by that stretch than a film this busy had any right to manage. Warnock does not act it; he simply looks happy for the first time, and when the dwarfs come back for him it feels like a small cruelty.
Rappaport is the engine. His Randall is a petty boss, a liar and a coward who believes he is a leader of men, and Rappaport plays him without a trace of the twinkle a lesser film would have demanded. None of the six is cute. They squabble, shove, steal from each other and leave Kevin behind more than once. That is the film’s best decision: the boy’s companions are not his friends, and he knows it.
The caveat about the middle is that there barely is one. The map is a shopping list and the film works through it, and for perhaps twenty minutes it is plainly marking time, with one long detour staged for a single joke. Gilliam has a dozen ideas a minute and no great interest in which order they arrive. At 116 minutes it could lose ten.
The caveat about the end we will not describe, except to say that the final minute is remembered by everyone who saw it young, and not fondly. It is a PG, and the certificate is earned. Gilliam went on to Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, bigger films with the same fingerprints; this one is smaller, quicker and, we think, kinder, right up until it isn’t.
Watch it with a child of about Kevin’s age and stay with them for the last scene. There will be a question, and the film has left it for you to answer.
