For a low budget movie, it has several notable British thespians, including Sean Connery, Ian Holm, Ralph Richardson, Peter Vaughan, and David Warner. It features six dwarfs who carry an all-important map that allows them to travel through portals of time and plunder the wealthy throughout the ages.
The film features Kevin (Craig Warnock), an English boy of about ten burdened with shallow, materialistic parents (David Daker, Sheila Fearn). Because it is a movie, six dwarfs (David Rappaport, Kenny Baker, Malcolm Dixon, Mike Edmonds, Jack Purvis, and Tiny Ross) break into his room and kidnap Kevin.
He joins them on their journeys through time, plundering in the times of Napoleon (Ian Holm), Robin Hood (John Cleese), and King Agamemnon (Sean Connery). Their time-changing antics get the attention of Evil Genius a.k.a. Satan (David Warner) and his adversary Supreme Being a.k.a God (Ralph Richardson).
How others will see it. Time Bandits had difficulty attracting financing from the studios, and might never have been made if it wasn't for ex-Beatle George Harrison, who invested in the project as he had earlier in The Life of Brian (1979).
The studios were proven wrong when the film opened atop the box office in the U.S., in the end making many multiples of its budget. Critics were generally pleased, since the film lived up to the title of the 1971 Monty Python film And Now for Something Completely Different.
Time Bandits mostly came up empty on the festival circuit, though it won something called the President's Award at the Saturn Awards, where it was nominated in five other categories.
Today at imdb.com, it has a respectable 64K user votes, more than Chariots of Fire (1981), the Best Picture winner at the Academy Awards. The user rating of 6.9 out of 10 for Time Bandits is only slightly lower than Chariots of Fire, which has a 7.1 rating.
Looking closer at the Time Bandits user rating, U.S. voters (7.2) like it more than non-Americans (6.8), and voters over 45 (7.0) like it more than voters under 45 (6.7). My guess is that Americans over 45 may be more familiar with Monty Python (the BBC television show and the subsequent films) than a younger, non-Anglo audience.
The user reviews, though, gloss on about Terry Gilliam, best known as the animator for the Monty Python BBC show prior to Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), which launched his erratic career as director.
How I felt about it. Although a boy plays the lead, and it is a silly comedy, it is not for children. For one thing, it is violent. It is in fact a movie without a traditional audience; the reason why the studios passed on it. But British actors undoubtedly found the script amusing, which was why they piled on instead of demanding millions for their roles.
Sean Connery, the A-list actor here, seems to be having a jolly time sending up his prior role in The Man Who Would Be King (1975). David Warner hams it up agreeably, and the script can be quite witty at times. And I guess that dwarf actors need roles, too.