Delayed Reaction: Time Bandits

Premise: A young boy gets recruited by a group of time-hoping bandits.

This isn't a new idea, but I think Terry Gilliam owes most of his career as a director to Time Bandits. Sure, he has a long list of notable films. Monty Python and the Holy Grail was his first and most famous now. That only became a cult hit after its release though. Brazil has become his critical calling-card, but that movie barely even got released and barely made money. The Fisher King and 12 Monkeys got surprising Oscar attention and made decent money. However, it's the success of Time Bandits that have kept studios coming back and throwing more money at him. This was a weird little movie, starring a mediocre child actor, and bunch of little people, and a few famous faces in odd supporting roles that was a top 10 movie at the box office in 1981. Time Bandits is the result studios imagine when they decide to take a chance on a filmmaker: he made something weird, original, and almost idiosyncratic that audiences responded well to. I don't think the budget was crazy either. Because Gilliam had Time Bandits, he could always convince a studio to fund his next strange idea.

It's not unwarranted either. Time Bandits is an absolute treat of a movie. It quickly jumps into the action. It doesn't get too bogged down explaining itself. The screenplay is structured to feel chaotic without actually being so. It has a sly sense of humor that can play differently for numerous age groups. I don't know how filming actually went, but it sure seems like everyone was having a great time just going crazy. I didn't realize how much Labyrinth owes to this. It really feels like Frank Oz watched Time Bandits and said "I could do that".

Important from a studio perspective, this doesn't feel like an accident. Watching this, it seems like Terry Gilliam has cracked some sort of code. Like he could make this movie a dozen more times with a dozen other ideas. Alas, after this success Gilliam got more ambitious. This started off well, yielding a pretty terrific run from 1985 (Brazil) to 1998 (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). His attempts to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote kind of broke him. His attempt to move back to traditional studio filmmaking with The Brothers Grimm exploded on him. Heath Ledger's death complicated the already questionable The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Then The Zero Theorem and a finally completed version of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote could not have landed with less of a thud or made less noise.

He had this gloriously fun movie though before his ambitions grew to something a little more divisive. I'm sort of angry I never found this movie when I was 8.

Verdict: Strongly Recommend