Help!

By RICHARD CORLISS

TIME BANDITS

Directed by Terry Gilliam Written by Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam

Monty Python Strikes Back at Star Wars. Crash of the Titans. Malice in Blunderland. The Gizzard of Odd. Is this what Gilliam and Palin had in mind? A nasty fantasy, an antiepic, a revisionist fable? Seems so: surely the pair of Pythonians who concocted this ragged film knew what they were about. If the scenario dismisses good ideas and stretches bad ones, if the comic timing in some sequences seems laboriously off, if the film manages to alienate the audience that might have been attracted to it--well, Gilliam and Palin must have wanted it that way.

Time Bandits'premise would suit the most wide-eyed space opera: an imaginative English lad finds six dwarfs tumbling out of his bedroom closet one night and accompanies them on their adventures through time and space. But the movie undercuts any involvement in the tale by stopping dead for long derisory skits featuring Napoleon (Ian Holm), Robin Hood (John Cleese) and Agamemnon (Sean Connery). It misuses Holm's talents, underuses Cleese's and doesn't use Connery at all--there's no way to turn him into a figure of antic misanthropy. The film finally regains its footing, with the supernal battle between a dithery Supreme Being (Ralph Richardson) and a technocratic Evil Genius (David Warner) who has his own ideas about creating the world ("I would have started with lasers, 8 o'clock on Day One!"). But by then it has forfeited any residue of good feeling. Who can care about six dwarfs when they're all Dopey?

Gilliam, the one American in the Python troupe, got his start in New York in the early 1960s as assistant editor of Harvey Kurtzman's humor magazine Help!, which specialized in live-action comic strips called fumettis (puffs of smoke). In Time Bandits, Gilliam is still the innovative graphic artist who brings strange worlds to extravagant life but cannot animate his actors. And he is still blowing smoke in the audience's face, literally and figuratively. Murk swirls through every setting with Bruegelesque squalor and Boschian doom; as a traveler on this time flight, the viewer is less welcome than ignored. He will have more fun holding Time Bandits at arm's length--in the movie's illustrated screenplay, published by Doubleday, and available at a price just slightly more than the amount Gilliam's film is likely to take in from befuddled moviegoers.

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