Time Bandits

Name: Time Bandits
Genre: Adventure, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Comedy
Released: November 6, 1981
Duration: 116 min
Rating: 79
Cast: David Rappaport, David Warner, Ian Holm, John Cleese, Katherine Helmond

1981

METASCORE

Generally favorable reviews based on 18 Critic Reviews

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USER SCORE

Generally favorable reviews based on 20 Ratings

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7.0

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7.0	User Score Generally favorable reviews based on 20 Ratings

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Movie Details & Credits

AVCO Embassy Pictures | Release Date: November 6, 1981 | PG

Starring: David Rappaport, David Warner, Ian Holm, John Cleese, Katherine Helmond, Michael Palin, Peter Vaughan, Ralph Richardson, Sean Connery, Shelley Duvall

Summary: A young boy accidentally joins a band of time traveling dwarves as they jump from era to era looking for treasure to steal.

Director: Terry Gilliam

Genre(s): Adventure, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Comedy

Rating: PG

Runtime: 116 min

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Metascore

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Critic Reviews

100

Jordan Farley

Wonderfully whimsical children’s fantasy about a young boy’s journey through the space-time continuum in the company of six cantankerous dwarves. Read full review

100

Time Out London Nigel Floyd

An extraordinarily inventive fantasy in which schoolboy Warnock is rescued from a dull suburban existence by a band of renegade dwarfs, who emerge from his wardrobe and whisk him off on an incredible journey through time and space. Sometime Monty Python animator Gilliam fills the screen with bizarre images, and directs with a breathless ingenuity. Read full review

100

Empire Ian Nathan

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

Staff (Not Credited)

Time Bandits has a wonderful, Zelig-like quality to be whatever you want it to be. Do the diminutive bandits represent the Pythons? Sure, probably, to some extent. Is the film a fairy tale disguised as a revisionist history lesson? Yes, you can see it that way. Does it offer a commentary on the ills of modern society? I think so. Is it a combination of all those things and more? Very likely. Read full review

Jake Cole

Good as the cameos are, however, the lasting draw of the film is its exceptional aesthetic. Gilliam keeps his camera low in a child’s perspective, and wide-angle lenses only exacerbate the magnified sense of scale that everything has. Read full review

Tasha Robinson

It’s sloppy and slippery, but for a $5 million movie, it’s remarkable. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

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. Read full review

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User Reviews

amheretojudge

Jul 8, 2018

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 itselftime 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.… Expand

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