They say comedy is all about timing, not time travel.
Alas, if only there was anything funny at all in Apple TV+’s “Time Bandits,” a rehash of the 1981 Terry Gilliam film. That cult-classic romp came from the minds behind Monty Python and was witty, inventive and surprising. Its successor? Not so much.
For Apple’s version, the Python brain trust has been replaced with a more current crowd: Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement. The pair are behind FX’s superb “What We Do in the Shadows,” and each has plenty of comedy credentials in his own right, from Waititi’s sadly canceled “Our Flag Means Death” to Clement’s long “Flight of the Conchords” career.
These are funny guys, and they are working off the template of a funny, if dated, movie. So the end result should be funny, right? That’s the Hollywood math that leads to these revivals, remakes and reboots, anyway. Funny + funny = money. I mean funny.
But even if the recipe was right, something went wrong in the oven. “Bandits” (streaming Thursdays, ★½ out of four) is a slog. The story of a history-obsessed kid who’s whisked off to travel in time with a group of hapless thieves just doesn’t work in this new version, which stars Lisa Kudrow as the head hapless thief in charge. It’s boring, the jokes are tired and predictable, the stakes are down in the basement, and the actors are entirely lacking in chemistry.
The cast is a real problem from the first moments of the series. The young actor playing Kevin the history nerd (Kal-El Tuck) is very cute and sweet, Kudrow still has a magnetic smile but the group of bandits (Charlyne Yi, Rune Temte, Tadhg Murphy and Roger Jean Nsengiyumva) is a mishmash of performers who seem to think they’re in five different shows. Each bandit hardly has enough characterization to make you remember their name, let alone care about anything that happens to them. (One of the main actors, Yi, says they were the victim of abuse and assault by another actor on the set. Yi uses they/them pronouns.)
“Bandits” is all muddy and messy and not entirely coherent, and that has nothing to do with the whole sci-fi time travel part. The movie’s appeal was putting this group of funny people together on a silly journey with a cute kid and family-friendly jabs at history, but this “Bandits” gets all the details wrong. The tone is too silly for adults but not silly enough for kids. It doesn’t help that in the 43 years since the first movie came out, irreverent historical comedy has become something of a played-out genre (look at “History of the World Part II” and “Miracle Workers” in just the past few years). All the elaborate costuming, CGI dinosaurs and smoky glares from Clement (as a character helpfully known as the root of all evil) can’t cover up a fundamentally weak script.
It’s not necessarily any one person’s fault, just a whole lot of disparate elements that don’t fit together. I feel especially bad for Kudrow, who has struggled over the past few years to find a steady role to match her talent. She is a very particular kind of actress, for sure, but writers on “Mad About You,” “Friends” and “The Comeback” managed to create iconic roles. Come on Hollywood, do better for her.
Hollywood can generally just do better. “Bandits” probably didn’t need to be remade. We are certainly living in an era where existing intellectual property is king, but when you go this obscure, what’s the point? Maybe 1 in 3 potential viewers will have vaguely heard of the movie before. Big whoop.
Waititi and Clement are some of the best talents in the industry, but even the best aren’t faultless. “Shadows” is their own creation, and it’s clear they are better when they’re working off their own material instead of another soulless reboot.
Maybe the timing just wasn’t there for them.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ‘Time Bandits’ review: Apple’s reboot of 1981 film is a slog
