Tad and the Magic Lamp
(Tadeo Jones y la Lámpara Maravillosa)
Director – Enrique Gato – 2026 – Spain – Cert. U – 94m
***1/2
In search of Aladdin’s lamp with a powerful villain in hot pursuit, Tad and his companions are transported back in time to (the) Mummy’s ancient, South American civilization – out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 23rd
Gato’s fourth instalment of the Tad the Lost Explorer franchise starts off in London with Tad pursuing a baby through the clockwork mechanisms of Big Ben, a sequence which recalls the climactic sequence of Disney’s Basil, the Great Mouse Detective (Ron Clements, Burny Mattinson, Dave Michener, Juhn Musker, 1986). It turns out that the baby is his and partner Sara’s, and that Tad is engaged in parenting chores while she is out and about with the Egyptian princess researching the magic lamp reputed to belong to Aladdin and rumoured to be in a room in Buckingham Palace unbeknownst to its royal occupants and accessible via a secret passage.
Entry to the secret passage is though a secret door in a pub, which can only be opened with a special dart which Sara tracks down in a Notting Hill antique shop. She is accompanied by both the Egyptian princess and a new sidekick, a bot from Sara’s university department which has been programmed with her personality and seems to anticipate anything she might do much faster than she does, making her feel like it’s taking her job away. It insists it’s not doing this, that it merely wants to give her time to relax, while it does all the hard work, unaware that this is saying pretty much the same thing.
Hot on their tail along with two henchmen is the spiky-ball-wielding Soliman whose family – descended from the rulers of ancient South American civilisation Paititi from which (the) Mummy came – has been trying to get its hands on the magic lamp for centuries. We are presented with a brief history of said lamp, which goes through Aladdin, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, and even Sinbad the sailor before winding up hidden in Buckingham Palace.
The pub which constitutes the back entrance to the Palace is described, in what is probably the film’s funniest gag, as the one the queen used to use from time to time when she fancied going out for a drink. The dart must be thrown at a particular spot on a dartboard in order to open the secret door. The bot throws the dart at the exact spot admitting our heroes to the secret passageway.
The next obstacle is a room in the palace with, in its centre, the cupboard of antique teapots and china situated within which resides the magic lamp. All over the carpet around this cupboard, however, are sleeping corgis, which should they be be woken up are likely to provide vicious resistance. Tad gingerly approaches the cupboard, taking great care not to awaken the sleeping dogs only for Mummy to pursue him with complete abandoned treading on them all, threatening to wake them all up.
Eventually they find the lamp and activate it, releasing a genie who turns out to be a middle-aged woman with a typewriter who doesn’t who doesn’t take kindly to being just awoken from her her otherworldly rest and relaxation. Apparently Queen Victoria had wasted three wishes increasing the size of her crown, the size of the palace’s guards’ busby helmets and inventing further hats for the male English populace.
Mummy makes similarly bad choices, wishing Jeff the dog and Belzoni the macaw to speak human language which allows them to be voiced by actors from this point on when they managed to entertain the audience fairly well in previous episodes without human voices. (Apart from the initial surprise of having them talk, this device doesn’t really add anything, so, it seems a curious creative choice.) Mummy’s third choice is to be sent back to ancient Paititi, taking almost everyone else with him.
Except Tad,. Tad is left behind to fight Soliman and his henchmen, escaping through what turns out to be an Underground train tunnel, eventually activating the left behind magic lamp himself to take him back to the same time and place as everybody else. In the process, alas, the lamp is broken into many pieces by an Underground train.
Arriving in the ancient world, Sara’s party are promptly taken prisoner by by a palace guard armed with a spear who turns out to be a younger version of Mummy and who demonstrates his lack of judgement by saying the wrong thing in the presence of the rulers at the top of the of their town’s pyramid who promptly have him thrown out of the royal guard.
This means that Mummy is likely to disappear along with anyone else whose existence depends on his presence in history, which in turn means that from here on in, various characters are threatened with disappearing in the manner of characters in Back To The Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985). As the plot progresses, it also throws in a desert chase reminiscent of Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015) in which one of the villain’s vehicles features an electric guitarist playing standing up to spur it on.
The piece’s greatest assets are its set pieces and visual designs. The Big Ben clock tower at the beginning is fantastic; the Buckingham Palace room with sleeping corgis is highly memorable, while both contemporary London and ancient Paititi are cleverly rendered in great detail so that you marvel at them as you see them on the screen.
What the film doesn’t do, which it’s the previous instalment did so well, is maintain a stream of genuinely funny gags. There are a few such moments but not really any more than a few, which is a pity. Aside from the gag about the queen using the pub, the other high point comes right at the end of the film, which steals its hilarious, closing line of dialogue from Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959).
That’s not quite the last line here because, in true time travel story tradition, Tad is immediately heard to remark that at least none of them screwed anything up by doing the wrong thing and changing the future, which leads as the credits roll to a sequence of photographs and accompanying magazine articles, showing all the things that our protagonists have indeed screwed up and which have changed as a result of their adventures.
As with its predecessor, the Spanish production reaches the UK in an English-dubbed version – fair enough given the film is aimed squarely at kids – which feels like the voices might have been pre-recorded then the picture animated to that recording later. (If the voices were post-synced, which I doubt, it’s a remarkable job.) The film also exists in Spanish- and Catalan-dubbed versions, which I would guess (not having seen them, so I might be wrong) would be post-dubbed.
If the new film isn’t as breathtakingly funny as its predecessor, it nevertheless works well enough as a globetrotting, travelog-styled adventure with time travel thrown in. This Londoner didn’t spot any obvious gaffes: London is pictured believably enough here. As for the time the film spends in the past in the world that Mummy came from, it also feels like a lot of time and effort has gone Into recreating that world. However, there are places where the film appears to be treading water and needs something else to bring it to life, which wasn’t the case with its immediate predecessor.
So, all in all, a decent family film which is likely to keep the kids entertained, but not a patch on the previous film.
NB The English language voice cast list was not available to press at the time of this review.
Tad and the Magic Lamp is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, October 23rd.
Trailer: