Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s remake of Terry Gilliam’s film is gentle where the original was wild, and ten episodes is a long time to stay gentle. Lisa Kudrow’s grumbling Penelope is the reason to keep watching, and she is nearly reason enough.
Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits came out in 1981 and was grubby, frightening and rude about parents, and children loved it for exactly those reasons. The new series, created by Taika Waititi, Jemaine Clement and Iain Morris, keeps the boy, the wardrobe, the map and the gang of thieves, and files down everything with an edge. What is left is ten episodes of amiable, well-dressed wandering through history, with a lead performance better than the show around it.
Lisa Kudrow plays Penelope, who leads the bandits because, as she keeps reminding them, there was a vote. She delivers almost everything under her breath: a complaint about the quality of the loot, a reference to a former fiancé nobody asked about, a correction to a plan she proposed a minute ago. We laughed, out loud and more than once, and nearly every time it was Kudrow saying something unkind about her own gang in the tone of a woman reading a shopping list. She also gives Penelope a flicker of hurt whenever her authority is questioned, which is often, and that flicker is the only thing in the series that feels as if it cost anyone anything.
The gang is written as five jokes and played, mostly, as five people. Roger Nsengiyumva’s Widgit holds the map and reads it wrong, with the calm of a man who has never once been right. Rune Temte’s Bittelig is enormous and gentle and apologises to things he breaks. Tadhg Murphy’s Alto treats every ambush as an audition. Lo Mutuc’s Judy, the group’s psychologist, misreads everyone she meets, and Mutuc is given less to do with that than the others get with theirs. Kal-El Tuck plays Kevin as a polite, over-informed boy who would rather explain Stonehenge than escape from it, which is the right note, though the script keeps handing him the lecture.
Mike Berlucchi lights nearly all of it in bright, even daylight, so Troy and Stonehenge and the court of Mansa Musa look like the same clear afternoon, and the sets are handsome without ever being frightening. Mark Mothersbaugh’s score is bouncy and reassuring and tells us at every turn that nothing bad will happen, and nothing does. The editors, Ilya Klarich and Jonno Woodford-Robinson, leave a beat after every line for the improvised afterthought, and the afterthought is not always there.
Waititi and Clement have a house style by now: everyone underplays, someone points out that the situation is a bit silly, the villain is more irritated than evil. It served What We Do in the Shadows because vampires have had centuries to get bored. Here it flattens everything. Gilliam’s film ran on a child’s sense that adults were dangerous and the world was unfair, and its thieves would have sold the boy for a decent haul. Waititi’s Supreme Being is a chatty, distracted boss in a good suit. Clement’s Pure Evil is Clement doing the slow, aggrieved voice he does, surrounded by minions he cannot bear, and we enjoyed him; Jonny Brugh’s Damon, the underling who cannot finish a sentence without being corrected, is the best thing in those scenes. But nobody is ever in danger we believed, and a story about a boy chased across history by evil needs the evil to mean it.
Kiera Thompson arrives properly as Saffron, Kevin’s older sister, a few episodes in, and the series picks up when she does. She is rude, bored, unimpressed by everything the gang has to offer, and she wants her brother back more than he seems to want anything. Thompson plays her without a scrap of sentiment, and the scenes she drives have a shape the rest lack. By the fourth episode we had checked how many were left. That is not a feeling a family adventure should produce, and the reason was plain: each episode has one location, one famous person, one chase and one escape, and the map is misread at the same point every time.
The series is good-natured, it looks expensive and there is nothing in it to upset a nine-year-old. Across ten episodes it carries a 12 certificate and a great deal of walking, and it would have been a better six.
