Time Bandits

Time Bandits is the best children's picture since The Black Stallion, but it is a satiric, inventive, fantastical vacation for the filmgoer of any age: imagine an intelligent Raiders of the Lost Ark with a deeply bitchy sense of humor. [06 Nov 1981]

Time Bandits is at once sophisticated and childlike in its magical but emotionally cool logic, and this tone is perfectly captured in young Warnock's appealingly sensible performance. Cleese, Warner, Richardson, Holm and Connery are in great form, and the bandits (David Rappaport, Kenny Baker, Jack Purvis, Mike Edmonds, Malcolm Dixon and Tiny Ross) are all gifted comic actors. Made on a modest budget, Time Bandits is a wonderful wild card in the fall movie season [09 Nov 1981, p.92]

For a kids film this is pleasingly dark with Gilliam delivering as much classical fairy tale as knockabout comedy.

This wild and sometimes woolly fantasy is delivered in the customary chaotic Python style, resulting in an onslaught of witticisms and slapstick.

First reactions while viewing Time Bandits: It's amazingly well-produced. The historic locations are jammed with character and detail. This is the only live-action movie I've seen that literally looks like pages out of Heavy Metal magazine, with kings and swordsmen and wide-eyed little boys and fearsome beasts.

An uneven special effects extravaganza about a little boy who winds up traveling through world history along with five midgets. Together they meet and frustrate the great and the near-great. Including Napoleon, Robin Hood, and the devil. Unfortunately, there are just too many visits to famous people. The film was created by some of the people responsible for the Monty Python comedies. [25 Dec 1981, p.12]

When you can count the laughs in a comedy on the fingers of one hand, it isn’t so funny. Time Bandits, is a kind of potted history of man, myth and the eternal clash between good and evil as told in the inimitable idiom of Monty Python. Not that the basic premise is bad, with an English youngster and a group of dwarfs passing through time holes on assignment by the Maker to patch up the shoddier parts of His creation. What results, unfortunately, is a hybrid neither sufficiently hair-raising or comical.

time to stand still for the punch.. Time Bandits 2 And A Half Out Of 5 Time Bandits is a plot driven comic feature that keeps its jokes under its sleeve as a shield which unfortunately is penetrable. Despite of being bound and connected with the characters and a premise, it feeds itself off on various comic sketches for the most part of it, which clearly is not acceptable. It falls flatly on face on technical aspects like background score, production design, sound department, costume design, cinematography, art design and editing. The camera work is stultifyingly dull and immature for no matter how plausible the effort be to crack a smile on viewers' face, it is undeniably ludicrous. The screenplay by Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam is, as mentioned earlier, a series of various jokes and is never given the priority to anything but the punch line of it. Terry Gilliam; the director, has done a decent work on executing such an eerie script but it fails to connect with the audience as essential. The performance works on the humorous aspect of it but as far as emotions are concerned they come out a bit shallow. Time Bandits actually manipulates for time to stand still for the punch on any or every mannerism of the sequence.