Terry Gillium makes weird movies. The one-time animator for the Monty Python troop, he’s known for having productions that rarely seem to go well and making really bizarre feature films from time to time. I wouldn’t say I was a huge fan or anything, but at the least, I like the angles he takes on his work. There’s a creativity to a Gillium movie that comes out every time if for no other reason than anything he does is kinda weird.
So, really, it was about time I finally saw Time Bandits. I actually got to see about half of it off (I think) CBS as a kid but it didn’t make a lot of sense and my parents sent me to bed at the halfway point. I’m an adult now, so maybe it’ll make more sense now.
I mean, it did make more sense, and I’m much more in tune with the movie’s sense of humor now. So, that’s a plus.
Young Kevin (Craig Warnock) is an imaginative English boy with an incredibly unimaginative pair of parents. One night, an armored knight charges through Kevin’s bedroom but, aside from making a lot of noise to alert Kevin’s dad, leaves no evidence of his existence. Waiting up for another incident the following night, Kevin is surprised when six small men come out of his wardrobe, dressed in a wide variety of mismatched clothing and carrying a map of some kind. The six push on a wall and it goes down a corridor that shouldn’t exist. Kevin follows when a frightening giant face appears behind the men demanding the return of the item they stole.
And then Kevin and the six men find themselves in the Napoleonic wars. The leader of the six, Randall (David Rappaport), wants to rob Napoleon (Ian Holm), and says he and his comrades are a group of skilled thieves with a map of all time and space stolen from the Supreme Being (Ralph Richardson when he finally appears). Kevin can go along for the ride if he wants to help, and since Kevin is notably smarter than the lot of them (which includes Kenny “R2-D2” Baker), well, the boy’s warnings and advice often fall on deaf ears anyway.
And then, trapped in a fortress on the mythical plane, Evil (David Warner) plots to get the map for himself so he can remake time and space to his own liking.
Given the script from Gillium and Michael Palin (who appears in two scenes as sort of the same character), the movie does have a very Pythonesque sense of humor. Aside from a somewhat grim ending for Kevin, it is also probably the most kid-friendly form of Pythonesque humor available. Historic figures are, by and large, disappointing. Napoleon demands entertainment from men shorter than he is and fails to recognize why the puppeteer that just died can’t keep performing. Robin Hood (John Cleese) seems a bit oblivious to how awful the Merry Men are. And the Titanic is just gonna sink anyway. The one stand out is the ancient Greek king Agamemnon (Sean Connery, who apparently took the role because it amused him even though the production couldn’t afford his usual rate), a fellow who is every bit the parent Kevin might actually want before Randall and the others swoop in and carry Kevin off again just after the Greek king adopted the boy.
However, the movie gets a lot weirder when the bandits get to the mythical zone and Evil’s fortress/prison. Warner these days is known for roles like Evil, a bombastic but classy-sounding guy who turns his minions into dogs when he doesn’t turn them into puffs of smoke, the minions grateful for the attention the whole time. There’s some lessons in there about good and evil, but it all gets muddled when even the Supreme Being can’t be bothered to explain anything at all about why evil exists in the first place. Authority figures here, for the most part, aren’t there to help. They’re generally too wrapped up in their own concerns.
So, was it worth the multiple decade wait to finally see the movie from start to finish? Well, I’d seen the ending before, and I’d seen the beginning, but yes, this was another interesting trip into the weird world of Terry Gillium.
Grade: B+
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