Time Bandits, Apple TV+ review - larky expanded rerun of the Gilliam/Palin classic

“Family-friendly fun” seems to have mutated over the years into elaborate films featuring high-octane animation, starry voicing and often mushy sentiments. In older children’s TV, gone are the days of actual humanoids mucking about with stun guns. Only Doctor Who has continued to deliver the teatime goods.  

So the arrival of Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s Time Bandits on Apple TV+ is to be relished. It’s rated PG, I’m not sure why, unless its scary bits are considered just a tad too scary. Having your uncaring parents incinerated into lumps of carbon would strike me as an event some revolting children might raise a cheer at, but I’m a childless cat lady, so what do I know?

In fact, there is some sensitive Hollywood parenting in this adaptation, just not at Kevin’s house in Bingley, where his mum and dad are just as mindless as in the 1984 film, heads stuck in their smartphones as they notionally watch television. Mum thinks Kevin is obsessed with the “Ancient Geeks”; Dad has no time for Kevin’s fascination with the past. Both are delighted when they think he is playing video games in his room, “something modern”, while they send each other texts sitting side by side on the sofa. Amusingly, they even read out the online synopsis of the TV series they are in.

It’s the lead Time Bandit, Penelope (Lisa Kudrow), who doles out small amounts of TLC to Kevin, though she tends to talk in greetings-card platitudes such as (to an Aztec chief): “A Stranger Is Just a Friend You Haven’t Met Yet.” This is essentially Phoebe Buffay redux, a ditz in a headband who is wonderfully scatty and only the leader because the previous one died and her associates are even more hopeless. They are a motley crew of oafs and lummocks (no dwarves) from eras across the ages, setting out on their first heist.

But even though Penelope thinks Kevin's parents do a bad job, she, like them, doesn’t understand the boy’s superior intelligence properly. Here he is much more of a nerd than the film’s Craig Warnock. That Kevin was a typical dinosaur-and-Vikings fan rather than a brainiac with intellectual curiosity who can reel off dates and facts, even if some are from what the Aztec queen calls “Wicky-Petey”. He can’t resist going along with the Bandits.

The superstructure of the original piece is untouched. There’s still a wardrobe through which medieval knights charge at night on horseback, as if the models Kevin loves to make alone in his room have come alive; and out the back of it, it leads to places since the beginning of time, just many more of them than in the film, as Waititi has more airtime (10 episodes) to fill. Travel is still via portals found on the Blueprint of the Universe, which the bandits have half-inched, The villain of the piece is still the Evil Being (Clement) with his fruity baritone, bad-guy diction and grotesque headgear; and his master is once again the Supreme Being, a giant head with a magisterial voice that zooms around on castors – and turns out to contain a camp silver-haired Waititi (pictured above) in a dressing gown covered in blue skies and clouds. 

Key to the show’s success is Kal-El Tuck’s Kevin, a droll little chap in aviator glasses and an outsize crusader tunic, who becomes even more comic-looking once he starts sporting a Biggles-style leather flying helmet, aka the Translation Cap. (The superhero fans among you will note that Tuck’s parents presciently named him after Superman.) Kevin is 12 going on 50, but he’s an endearing boy, full of data and idealistic notions about experience being the best thing to take away from somewhere new, not its most precious jewelled objects.

His enthusiasm for history will hopefully rub off on younger viewers. Here is a boy who can get excited about seeing Stonehenge being built – a funny scene couched in the language of a modern-day building site, with Ross Noble as the foreman. When Noble gets too bossy, one of his forced-labour gang actually says, “What did your last slave die of?” Kevin finds a kindred spirit at the siege of Troy, where he is able to tell Cassandra she was right about that big horse, and they bemoan the fact that people don’t believe their predictions. 

The theme music of the series, by Mark Mothersbaugh, tells you this is going to be fun from the off, a jauntier version of the upbeat opening-credits music to The Mandalorian, very cheeky and pan-pipey. The direction hams it up yet keeps things funny, never allowing a high-budget gloss to spoil the look, which at times is more like early Star Trek and its polystyrene rocks than mega-budget Marvel (with whom Waititi also collaborates, having co-written and directed the standout Thor: Ragnarok and its sequel Thor: Love and Thunder). The SFX aren’t allowed to eclipse the human and domestic elements that give the series its heart.

This human touch is palpable throughout – even in the Evil Being (pictured above), who is like a playground show-off locked in deadly rivalry with the school swat, whose name he can’t say without wanting to vomit. When he outlines his vision for an evil empire, it still has a small-boy filter. Rats will eat cats! Up will be down! Eyes will be in our buttocks, so the choice will be seeing or not wearing pants…  

Just four episodes have dropped so far; if the next six are as larky and enjoyable, this is a worthy addition to the roster of TV hits that parents will sneak a happy peek at too and relive being 10 again.

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