Taika Waititi co-created Apple TV+ series gets off to a great start, before rapidly descending into a padded mess.
Akhil Arora, a Film Critics Guild member and a Rotten Tomatoes-certified TV critic, who has watched all 10 episodes of Time Bandits. He has been reviewing TV series since 2015 and has written for NDTV and SlashFilm.
In early 2019, when Apple signed Taika Waititi as creator, writer, and director on its television series adaptation of the beloved eighties kids’ movie Time Bandits, his star was on the rise. The Kiwi filmmaker had successfully transitioned from a tiny indie comedy-drama set in New Zealand to a mega-budget superhero romp part of a massive, shared world. Better yet, Waititi had reinvigorated the God of Thunder’s forgettable trilogy with Thor: Ragnarok. All the gates of Hollywood were swinging open for the writer-director. But since then, Waititi has struggled. The Hitler satire Jojo Rabbit lacked bite and was showered with more praise than it deserved. Thor: Love and Thunder and Next Goal Wins were both disasters of epic proportions.
Waititi’s episodes are solid, but Time Bandits is too long
The only respite had been the various TV shows Waititi had been involved with. Could he continue that with Time Bandits? Having seen all 10 episodes of the Apple TV+ series’ first season—Waititi directs and co-writes the first two episodes and serves as creator alongside frequent collaborators Jemaine Clement and Iain Morris—I can tell you with confidence that the answer is (partly) yes. Of all the directors involved with the Apple show, Waititi handles his episodes the best. The jokes are solid, the editing is great, and it helps Time Bandits to be quick out of the gates. But the show can’t sustain it, which led me to wonder. Did Waititi get the best scripts, or did he make them better on set with his much-talked-about improv techniques?
Time Bandits cast: who’s who in the Apple TV+ series?
Lisa Kudrow and co-creators Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement headline the new series reimagining of the famous ‘80s movie. Here’s the full list.
Waititi doesn’t completely disappear after episode 2, mind you. He has a recurring role in the Apple series, and he is one of the creators, too. But the jokes don’t come by with the same frequency in the middle episodes—it takes the finale for the show to get good again—and don’t display the same level of self-awareness. Moreover, Time Bandits retreads ground while the narrative spins around in circles. With each successive episode, the show’s formula wears thin.
Ultimately, Time Bandits simply doesn’t have enough content to fill 10 episodes. It’s heavily padded and would’ve been better off as a shorter adventure, maybe five episodes or so. With episodes between 32 and 47 minutes, that would essentially mean it would be the length of a feature film. And that’s the central issue. Apple TV+’s Time Bandits remake is another one of those titles that can’t justify its existence as a long-form project.
A prepubescent kid and self-styled “Time Bandits”
As with the film it’s based on, Time Bandits is centred on Kevin Haddock (Kal-El Tuck), a kid who loves history and is a resident of Bingley, England. Every birthday, he takes his parents and deeply annoyed sister Saffron (Kiera Thompson) to a historical site which translates for them as “a deeply boring pile of rocks”. Kevin’s parents love taking the mickey out of him and berate him for always looking into the past. History is no good to anyone, they say, and Kevin ought to embrace the future. He’s the first child whose parents want to buy a new phone for him. At school, he bores his classmates, too, with facts no one asks for. Kevin seems most at ease on his own, be it as he paints a woolly mammoth figurine or plays board games with himself.
A Narnia twist later, Kevin learns that his bedroom is a transtemporal portal. In simple English, it’s a gateway to the cosmos. One night, a bunch of self-styled Time Bandits turn up with a map—one that helps them travel through time—that they’ve apparently stolen from the Supreme Being (Waititi). Unlike the film, they aren’t a bunch of dwarves. (There are other changes, too, which is why the Apple series is “based in part” on characters created by Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin, the film’s writers.)
There’s Penelope (Lisa Kudrow) who claims not to be a leader as the group is a collective—she’s merely the one in charge—but likes to do all the leader-y things. In fact, everyone in the Time Bandits is a fraud at some level. The master psychologist Judy (Charlyne Yi), who doesn’t respect leadership, is not very good at what she does. Alto (Tadhg Murphy) is the master of disguise except he’s no good at that either. Widgit (Roger Jean Nsengiyumva) the map reader isn’t great at reading maps. Bittelig (Rune Temte) claims to have the strength of seven average-strength men—and he’s the only one who isn’t lying. They used to work for the Supreme Being as shrubbery designers but got tired of doing everything his way. So, they ran away with the map.
Time Bandits takes a trip through history
After a close shave with the Supreme Being, Kevin inadvertently ends up with the Time Bandits. As with the movie, it kicks off a long-ranging historical tour and the Apple series has a lot of fun with its time-travel hijinks. I don’t wish to spoil any of the settings, but you should know that the episodic titles nearly always tell you where the episode is going to be set. So, if you really care about not knowing, you might want to avoid those as well.
Time Bandits is driven by three chief elements. The group wants to get Kevin back home because he’s a stowaway. They want to keep the Supreme Being at bay who’s annoyed that such nincompoops could steal the all-important map. And oh, the fact that they aren’t locking portals behind them which is leading to anomalies. (Time Bandits doesn’t have as much fun with this as it ought to.) The last of them involves Pure Evil (Clement)—basically the Devil—who’s got plans of his own with the map. He enlists his demons, including one Fianna (Rachel House), to capture the Time Bandits. This is where the show begins to stumble as Fianna chases after the group in the slowest, most ridiculous way imaginable.
Sure, it is a kids’ show, but I don’t like that excuse. That also accounts for some of the Apple series’ other facets. It tends to over-explain some lingo and the exposition can be a bit much, so the younger cohort can follow what’s happening. But it’s easy to stomach for the most part.
The Time Bandits don’t really matter
But the bigger problem is that the Time Bandits aren’t individualised and fleshed out. For the most part, they are saddled with two-line descriptors which don’t amount to much. Of course, with Kudrow being first billed, Penelope is served better than others. Her dislike of being called a coward turns into an entire subplot in one episode. And with Kevin, she slowly develops some sort of maternal leaning. In the early running, though she can see Kevin is treated harshly by his parents, she isn’t bothered to do anything about it. It’s clear she only cares about herself and is using Kevin to get to her own personal goal—a forlorn Penelope is looking for her lost fiancé Gavin.
But everyone else is sort of forgettable. Midway through the season, one of the Time Bandits is lost. But they never return, and it doesn’t matter, which says a lot about the show. It doesn’t make a difference because the group’s members aren’t unique enough to contribute, so you don’t know what you’re missing when they are gone.
There is fun to be had. Kevin doesn’t really get any respect from the group, as with his parents, even when he’s right. At the same time, it’s smart enough to send up how theoretical knowledge can fail you by way of baking that lesson as a joke into the story. In doing so, Time Bandits not only upends racist caricatures but also communicates the importance of not trusting secondary sources. It can get downright silly in other places as when Kevin foils a torture scheme by unravelling its recursive nature. But eventually, the Apple series threatens to turn into “Here’s another new setting for the Time Bandits while the main story plods along.”
The formula quickly wears out
After a point, merely going to more time periods and bringing in famous guest stars isn’t fascinating enough. The plot wears thin. The gang’s development is subpar. The jokes start to repeat themselves. And, as a result, the episodes are humdrum. In one of the last few episodes, a character remarks: “You’re not Time Bandits. You’re just hapless history tourists.” As the Apple series pushes into its run, that begins to ring true for its creators as well. Time Bandits has the strongest start I’ve seen in some time, but it fizzles out. It’s a semi-redemption for Waititi—he’s responsible for the best episodes but the overall product can’t sustain that, so Waititi the creator suffers.
The Time Bandits may not have a purpose and aren’t capable of much. That would sound similar to anyone who’s watched the television reimagining of Waititi and Clement’s What We Do in the Shadows. We follow the vampires and the Time Bandits because they are there for each other—at times, reluctantly or accidentally. The Kiwi duo clearly means for this to continue in its vein. The final shot of the final episode leaves deliberate room for a second season. But its formula has been wrung out so quickly that Time Bandits is already crying out for something new and fresh.
The first two episodes of Time Bandits are out Wednesday, July 24 on Apple TV+. Two new episodes drop weekly every Wednesday until August 21.
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What do you think?