‘Time Bandits’ review: A reimagined, delightful historical adventure

“Time Bandits,” premiering Wednesday on Apple TV+, adopts the premise and particulars of Terry Gilliam’s wonderful 1981 comic fantasy adventure and stretches it, without breaking, into a television series. Created by Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi and Iain Morris, it’s likable, lively, funny and fun.

Still, it’s best to put Gilliam’s film out of your mind, or at least not to mind the differences. There are some direct borrowings and a similar sort of humor, but where the movie is unsentimental, violent and grotesque — in a good way, I mean — the series is sentimental, not so violent and grotesque only when it comes to actual monsters. Most notably, the bandits, who were played by little people in the movie, led by the great David Rappaport and including Kenny Baker, the man inside R2-D2, are full-sized actors here. (There are little people in other roles, who appear to be set for a second-season plotline.)

As before, the central character is a small English boy named Kevin (Kal-El Tuck), whose room, unbeknownst to him, happens to be a portal through time and space. (Both Kevin and his room, the series suggests, are significant in a special way.) Kevin is an exuberant nerd whose impulsive lectures on history his parents, glued to their screens, find boring; his sister, Saffron (Kiera Thompson), a new character, regards him as ridiculous, pathetic and a little repulsive, as siblings can. She’ll play a large role in later episodes.

One night, a wardrobe in Kevin’s room begins to shake and emanate light, and when he opens the door, he finds himself on a faraway beach, in a faraway time, where a Viking is being chased by Saxons — nothing as dramatic as the knight on horseback that bursts into his bedroom in the film, but sufficiently alarming. Nevertheless, Kevin takes the opportunity to ask the hunted man “why the Vikings suddenly stopped their murderous ways and adopted agrarianism.”

Taika Waititi in Apple TV+’s “Time Bandits.”

(Apple TV+)

The next night, the self-styled Time Bandits — they refer to themselves this way, as if it’s a band name they decided on — creep into his room. They’re on the run from the Supreme Being, whose cosmic map they have stolen in order to commit robberies and escape with the loot to different times. (They are bad at this.) Each has been given a defining personality and team specialty, like Doc Savage’s crew or the Impossible Mission Force.

Penelope (Lisa Kudrow, bringing the full Kudrow) describes the gang as a collective but herself as the leader and is continually having to switch from “I” to “we” when describing even the smallest of their accomplishments — which indeed are generally small. She’s also nursing a broken heart. There’s a running joke in which she can’t remember Kevin’s name, which remains surprisingly funny, given how often it’s repeated.

Bittelig (Rune Temte), says Penelope, introducing the bandits to Kevin, “has the strength of seven average-strength men” and “a sensitive side.” Judy (Charlyne Yi), “the master psychologist,” restates the obvious or gets it wrong; Alto (Tadhg Murphy), a flamboyant actor, is their master of disguise; and map-reader Widgit (Roger Jean Nsengiyumva), is the sometimes accurate navigator. The colorful diversity of types makes them less plausible as anonymous low-level employees of the Supreme Being, but I didn’t think much about it until I wrote that sentence.

To cut to the 10-episode chase, Kevin is swept up in their draft as they try to evade the Supreme Being, who initially manifests as a giant three-faced head, but soon enough will be revealed as Waititi. Co-creator Clement plays Pure Evil, who also wants the map, and sends a demonic agent (Rachel House) to get it. Good and Bad will prove equally problematic.

Co-creator Jemaine Clement plays Pure Evil in “Time Bandits.”

(Apple TV+)

Co-written by Gilliam and Michael Palin, with appearances by Palin as a luckless dweeb through the ages and John Cleese as a posh Robin Hood, “Time Bandits,” the film, was very much a Python work. (Gilliam, the American in the group, created their animations.) Structurally, it’s a sketch show with a framing narrative, proceeding from the Napoleonic Wars to Sherwood Forest to ancient Greece to the Titanic and so on; its humor follows “Holy Grail” and “Life of Brian” in mixing historical and mythical scenarios with modern attitudes, issues and vernacular. Rowan Atkinson‘s “Blackadder” series worked from a similar playback, as did the recently canceled pirate comedy “Our Flag Means Death,” where Waititi was an executive producer, director and co-star.

The series follows in that vein. It’s highly episodic — indeed, there are episodes even within episodes. In the first 46 minutes alone, we visit a sea battle in 18th-century Macao, Stonehenge under construction — “It’s very much a venue for hire, innit, you know, you got your banquets, your weddings, your sacrifices,” Kevin is told — and ancient Troy, where the bandits plan to steal a famous horse they are surprised to find is large and made of wood.

Further adventures will take them to Prohibition New York, the Maya empire, the African desert, the Ice Age and Georgian England. There is tension, given the stealing — Kevin does not approve, and especially not “stealing from history” — the pursuers and the unpredictable environments, though Kevin conveniently knows a lot about wherever they happen to be.

The departure of Yi halfway through production — they accused an unnamed actor of sexual harassment, a charge the production office found to be unsubstantiated — is handled awkwardly, though I’m not sure there was an especially elegant way to do it. But while it must have occasioned a good deal of rewriting, their absence has no effect on the larger story.

And there is a larger story. There’s a brutal simplicity to Gilliam’s film, which works perfectly over two hours. But this is a long series with plans to go longer, and though there’s enough variety to maintain interest from episode to episode, the added length seems to require something extra. We get motivations and explanations and … feelings. Toward the end of the season, meaningful speeches creep in; they can feel a little obvious, a little made to order. But it doesn’t take long for the jokes to take over again.