Time Bandits

Two hours of Terry Gilliam's big boy fantasy. Terry is brimming with ideas like few people have, and he adds his unmistakable humour to the mix. (30.07.2002)

An absolutely typical Terry Gilliam. Nobody’s sticking their noses in his business and so he’s filmed this modern fantasy fairytale exactly the way he wanted. He mixed a fantasy world and the modern times. There’s also an incredibly dry British Monty Python humor thrown into the mix and that makes all of his die-hard fans happy. I’m not one of them, but I must admit that movies like this have their place in movie lovers’ world, it’s just that I don’t understand Gilliam’s worlds sometimes. (06.09.2014)

Terry Gilliam is known as a toyer and a creator with refined artistic sensibilities. His films are similar to the work of Jean Pierre Jeunet in terms of both strengths and weaknesses, meaning they have weaker plots but strong atmospheres and the aforementioned artistic elements. The same can be said for Time Bandits, where Gilliam throws around various stage ideas and artistic elements with full force, but unfortunately, most of the time, he fails to properly utilize them, so their potential is often lost. Gilliam's imagination is boundless, bringing a gang of greedy dwarves, medieval knights, a troubled Napoleon, a ruler of the realm of evil, and even God himself onto the screen. His film features classic Monty Python-esque absurd motifs, dry British humor with numerous one-liners, as well as a peculiar and grotesque interpretation of the director's characters. Genuine fear is absent rom his devil, who expresses his anger slowly in every sentence, and his God has a truly peculiar demeanor and appearance, making it perhaps the most insane portrayal of a heavenly ruler and creator ever used by a filmmaker. The film offers plenty of entertaining moments, but as a whole, it is somewhat disjointed, like a hundred-year-old machine in a technical museum, where visitors can admire the charming shapes of the mechanism and its nicely painted facade, but if they were to try and operate it, they would find that the rusty gears are breaking and the machine no longer works. It required more work on the screenplay, but even so, it is an honest, slightly surreal spectacle in true Gilliam style. Overall impression: 80%. (18.08.2009)