Treading Water
There’s not a lot to say about the latest Bikini Bottom Tale. It’s antic and hit has fart jokes. Good enough.
The SpongeBob Movie: Search for Squarepants
Director: Derek Drymon • Writers: Pam Brady, Matt Lieberman, based on the series by Stephen Hillenburg
Starring [English]: Tom Kenny, Bill Fagerbakke, Clancy Brown, Mark Hamill, Regina Hall, Rodger Bumpass
USA • 1hr 44mins
Opens Hong Kong December 25 • I
Grade: B
All things being equal, any new SpongeBob product is going to be met with utter indifference by non-fans and hand-clapping glee by die-hards of the long-running television series; it’s not The Simpsons, but SpongBob premiered on Nickelodeon way back in 1999 (!) and it’s been a cash cow ever since. Seriously, there’s been three films (The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water and The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run), two spin-off streaming films (Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie and Plankton: The Movie), no shit a Broadway show (SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical), and a heap of comics and video games. Add to that now a fourth film: The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants. Surprised? Don’t be. Running total: US$13 billion.
Search for SquarePants is hardly reinventing the franchise, if it ain’t broke and all that, though to its eternal credit it’s the first movie not predicated on rival Plankton trying to steal Mr Krabs’s secret Krabby Patty recipe. The new characters and new adventure coupled with SpongeBob’s typically surreal comedy and visual gags makes for precisely the type of boisterous multi-level family comedy so desperately needed at this time of year. You could do worse.
Ignorance is bliss
It’s pretty obvious that all involved in this SpongeBob outing are at least having a good time. You can never go wrong by adding voice work from Mark Hamill to your animation, and he delivers some perfect spit takes and pregnant pauses as The Flying Dutchman, the mythic ghost pirate that tricks our beloved SpongeBob SquarePants (Tom Kenny) into completing a quest that will lift the curse he’s under and trap poor Bob in his stead. SpongeBob gets into this mess because on the day he wakes up to discover he’s finally tall enough to ride a roller coaster with his best mate Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke) it turns out he’s too scared to. What he needs is a swashbuckler’s swagger, and a swashbuckling certificate, according to his mentor Mr Krabs (Clancy Brown), and so off he goes to the Underworld with Patrick to learn about bravery and how to swashbuckle. Of course, The Dutchman and his badass henchwoman Barb (Regina Hall) trick him into springing them from their watery prison, and Mr Krabs feels guilty about inspiring him to run off. So Krabs ropes in Squidward (Rodger Bumpass) to go save him – and of course for most of the time SpongeBob and Patrick are entirely clueless to any danger.
Like I said, The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants doesn’t colour outside the lines or anything, and the longer it gets in the tooth the less likely it is to do so – never mind the fact that as an IP it’s now owned by Paramount Skydance and the Trump-loving billionaires who’ve decimated CBS News. SpongeBob’s cutting edge days are over. But in the meantime, this last hurrah has its share of clever sight gags, ace line readings by Hamill and Hall – and really, Gary the pet snail and Davy Jones’s actual locker are never not going to be funny. It’s just as visually vibrant as the films have ever been, and if it’s butt/fart jokes you want, it’s butt/fart jokes you’ll get. An unrelated hightlight is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles short film that’s running before it: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Chrome Alone 2: Lost in New Jersey. Animated in the style of 2023’s underrated Mutant Mayhem, Kent Seki’s mini-adventure sees the Turtles on a hunt for a Christmas gift for Splinter and discovering cheap, tired copies of themselves pilfered from… somewhere. It’s a hilariously razor sharp anti-AI satire that distils why AI is actually totally shite for art. Not that Paramount Skydance will care if it makes them richer.