Time Bandits review: A zany, fearless remake

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Apple TV+‘s Time Bandits will make you nostalgic for a time that has long past, and not one of pirates, sultans, or walking woolly mammoths. The new series is, like so many other high-profile genre TV titles of the past few years, a remake. Based on the Terry Gilliam-directed 1981 film of the same name, it’s a quirky time travel adventure series about a group of would-be thieves who embark on a seemingly never-ending journey in which they bumble from one historical period to another. It’s a wacky sci-fi farce that’s just as interested in lampooning its many time travel tropes as it is in embracing the exhilarating thrills provided by them.

Despite being a straightforward episodic take on its parent film, Time Bandits feels more imaginative and refreshing than most of the big-budget sci-fi movies and TV shows that are made these days. It’s a real, proper adventure series — one that has enough heart and vibrant visuals to remind you of the kind of the family-friendly sci-fi blockbusters that were once commonplace in the 1980s. The series may never fully engross you in any of its recreated eras, but its joyful creative spirit makes it so inviting and pleasant to watch that you quickly find yourself wanting to get lost right alongside its characters in its detour-filled story.

Like the film that inspired it, Time Bandits follows a young boy named Kevin (newcomer Kal-El Tuck). Obsessed with history, Kevin isn’t very popular with his classmates or his family. His parents (James Dryden and Felicity Ward) desperately want him to turn his head away from the pages of his history books and toward the electronic screen of the smartphone they bought him, while his sister, Saffron (Kiera Thompson), wastes few opportunities to make fun of him and his interests. Time Bandits, which comes from creators Iain Morris and What We Do in the Shadows co-directors Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, establishes Kevin’s outsider existence efficiently and humorously in the show’s opening minutes before throwing a seismic wrench into his and his family’s quiet English life.

Said wrench comes in the form of a portal that appears in Kevin’s wardrobe one night and sends him back in time to the days of the Norse vikings. Even after he’s found his way back to his bedroom, Kevin is shocked when his bedroom’s portal is later used by the show’s eponymous group of oddball time travelers to escape their all-powerful boss, a Godlike figure known as the Supreme Being (played by Waititi himself). The Time Bandits, led by a standoffish Penelope (a dynamite Lisa Kudrow), inadvertently get Kevin looped into their wild adventures, which involve them traveling through different temporal portals to various times throughout history using a map of the universe they stole from the Supreme Being.

For Kevin, the chance to go to places and times like Ancient Greece and Medieval England is a dream come true. For Penelope and the rest of the Bandits, it’s simply an opportunity to make their mark on history by stealing as much as they can from everywhere they visit. Time Bandits predictably mines plenty of comedy from the clash between Kevin’s wide-eyed, wholesome joy and his companions’ more mercenary impulses. It also finds endless humor in its titular thieves’ repeated failures to actually steal anything of worth. Of all of its many wise creative decisions, making Penelope and her cohorts spectacularly bad at living up to their title proves to be one of Time Bandits‘ best. It’s a subversive twist that Clement, Waititi, Morris, and their fellow writers have a lot of fun with, and it’s one that’s reinforced by the vanity-free performances given by the show’s actors.

Kudrow inevitably shines in a role that seems, at first, a tad underwritten and one-note. Opposite her, Roger Jean Nsengiyumva strikes an endearingly clueless figure as Widgit, the Bandits’ designated guide, and Rune Temte similarly impresses and delights as softhearted, the group’s softhearted strongman. Tuck also turns out to be an instantly likable screen presence as Time Bandits‘ young lead, while Clement keys perfectly into the show’s goofy, playful comedic tone with his gloriously stiff performance as Pure Evil, a cosmic counter to Waititi’s Supreme Being who wants to capture and use his rival’s map to turn the world into a wholly miserable place. Some of Time Bandits‘ best jokes are delivered by Clement, whose scenes are largely divorced from the main action of the show, but are still rarely unwelcome.

As much as it may fashion itself as an ensemble comedy, though, not all of Time Bandits‘ characters and performances strike as strong of a chord as others. A recurring gag involving Alto (Tadhg Murphy), one of Penelope’s fellow bandits, and his dreams of becoming a professional actor never quite lands, and it proves to be a particularly distracting and unrewarding subplot in one otherwise standout midseason episode involving historical figures like the 4th Earl of Sandwich and Casanova. While Waititi’s usual smugness works for Time Bandits‘ narcissistic take on the Supreme Being, his increasingly apparent limitations as a performer still make his scenes in the latter half of the show’s 10-episode first season a chore to get through sometimes.

Time Bandits, additionally, never matches the surreality of its parent film’s visuals, nor does it ever go to as strikingly dark and cynical a place as that movie’s unforgettable left-turn ending. However, unlike so many shows with similarly high budgets, Time Bandits still emerges as a frequently visually stunning adventure series. It strives to bring every one of its episodes and time periods to life with as much color as possible, whether it be 1920s Harlem or 14th-century Egypt, and that only makes watching the show an even more enjoyable experience. It’s remarkably easy, in fact, to get just as caught up in Time Bandits‘ many adventures as its adolescent protagonist inevitably does.

That’s a testament to not only the contributions both in front of and behind the camera by its various team members, but also of the strength of its lighthearted, decidedly maximalist approach to its source material. Its heroes may fall short many, many times, but Time Bandits isn’t a show that ever stops halfway. It puts full force behind every one of its creative swings, no matter how absurd they may be, and many of them connect. Did we ever really need a Time Bandits show? No, and the series’ first season doesn’t try to argue that, either. What has emerged nonetheless is an expensive sci-fi TV series that earns its high price tag by being nothing more than ultimately, well, a good time.

The first two episodes of Time Bandits are streaming now on Apple TV+. New installments premiere weekly on Wednesdays. Digital Trends was given early access to the series’ entire 10-episode first season.