Well, time to kick off 2026 and a new year in reviews with something apropos—namely, about moving through time itself. We talked about Terry Gilliam not too long ago, and here’s one of his earlier feature works—the weird and wacky Time Bandits, which is just as oddball as its name would suggest.
Our focus is on a nerdy young boy Kevin (Craig Warnock) living to his chagrin with his vapid, consumerist parents more concerned with early 80s gadgets over anything else. It’s then that his bedroom turns out to host a rip in reality through which a gaggle of dwarves that may or may not be minor angels come rushing through with a map of spacetime itself, while all the time they’re pursued by what’s essentially God.
Didn’t think I was kidding when I said things were going to get weird and wacky, did you?
What follows are segments where Kevin and the dwarves bumble through various settings—first of all to encounter Napoleon in what’s probably the weakest part (hey, did you know that Napoleon was short? Well, he actually wasn’t, but we’re going to joke about it to death anyway!). Things ramp up when we bring back fellow Monty Python alumni John Cleese to play an air headed posh Robin Hood, and then we get introduced to another highlight with David Warner as essentially Satan. A Satan, who, as he so hammily lets us know, is also obsessed with technology, and would have rather the universe be based on lasers than silly things like bird species.
It’s not a movie I can call a masterwork of balanced writing—but it does seem to be essentially about a child trying to find meaning in a chaotic universe when his own family would rather ignore him, whether he’s in a dream world or not. There’s one long memorable sequence where he almost ends up as adopted son to King Agamemnon in Ancient Greece, played by Sean Connery (who actually took a hit to his usual colossal pay check for his one, surprisingly). Our dwarfish characters also seem to represent rebelling from your paternal authority to forge your own destiny—and as far as the eighties go, it’s not a bad representation of short people here despite how oddball it gets.
With that in mind, we still have Gilliam’s delightfully demented visual sense on full display here, as things get more surreal the more the movie goes on—can you name another one where our heroes take on a cyborg Satan with a full combination of tanks, cowboys, knights and more? Or where God turns out to be a very stuffy business manager in a suit? The vibes might be for everyone, and while it’s not quite as polished as some of Gilliam’s future classics, there’s still fun enough to be had here.
Not too long ago Taika Waititi came along for his own version to be adapted as a series, with some mixed reception—nixing the short people cast, but that in turn prompted debate whether this was itself not some kind of erasure itself. Either way, the Gilliam movie stands by itself—not quite on the level of Brazil or 12 Monkeys, but certainly a unique family flick from this era that might just be still worth a watch at any age 45 years on…
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