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Perhaps the most ferociously imaginative fantasy film Britain has ever
produced, Time Bandits - a violent, absurdist comedy for children - was
animator-turned-director Terry Gilliam's second solo film, following his 1977
debut, Jabberwocky. The script, by Gilliam and fellow Python Michael Palin, owed less to earlier British time travel movies, like The Amazing Mr. Blunden (d.
Lionel Jeffries, 1972) or Timeslip (d. Ken Hughes, 1955), than to British
fantasy literature, from Swift's Gulliver's Travels to Tolkien's The Hobbit and
C.S. Lewis's Narnia stories via the comic science-fiction of Douglas Adams.
With a dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's Alice and Mervyn
Peake's Gormanghast trilogy (the latter one of Gilliam's many unfulfilled
projects), Time Bandits gleefully de-romanticises history. Ian Holm's Napoleon
rants drunkenly that the world's greatest conquerors have all been under 5'1",
while John Cleese's Robin Hood greets the peasantry with all the vacuous
courtesy of a royal dignitary at a charity function. David Warner plays the
wonderfully malevolent villain, a human Swiss army knife known only as Evil,
while Sean Connery lends human warmth to the picaresque as a kindly King
Agamemnon (the only character in the entire movie who seems to care whether the
child hero lives or dies).
The humour is surreal, spiteful and very funny, while Gilliam's imagination
goes berserk in the final half, set in a make-believe era known as 'the Time of
Legends'. Here we find an irritable ogre stricken with lower-back pain, a
gormless sea giant, and the gothic vision that is the Fortress of Ultimate
Darkness. The film's £5 million budget evidently couldn't keep up with Gilliam's
fevered visions, and a further two scenes had to be dropped (one involving a
pair of spidery old ladies, the other a forest of monstrous hands).
The film's imagination versus rationality theme climaxes with an ingenious
skirmish in which a toy-littered bedroom becomes a sprawling battleground. Here
the shape-shifting Evil creatively dismantles an army of cowboys, spaceships and
tanks rallied from the annals of history. Even God Himself turns up (a priceless
cameo from Ralph Richardson, looking like a slightly bewildered bank
manager).
Despite favourable reviews, Time Bandits did only mediocre business in
Britain, where it was unhelpfully and misleadingly marketed as a Python film.
Promoted as a children's picture in the United States, however, it became a huge
success, despite US distributor Avco-Embassy's reservations about the
audaciously cruel ending.
Alec Worley
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1. A Botch Job (1:34)
