SpongeBob (Tom Kenny), the lovable and highly merchandisable naïf from Bikini Bottom, has a problem: His pet sea snail, Gary, has been stolen by the vain King Poseidon (Matt Berry) for use in his daily skincare routine. Those who have absorbed too many episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants (or even just the first SpongeBob SquarePants Movie) may recall that the series already has a King Neptune. But never mind, there’s plenty of room at the bottom of the ocean for both the Greek and the Roman gods. It’s not as though this decades-spanning, multi-billion-dollar property has ever put a premium on logic: The silliness is an important part of its cross-generational appeal.
In fact, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge On The Run could use a little more of it. Considering that this is the third planned big-screen outing for this most porous of cartoon protagonists (it moved to Paramount Plus due to the pandemic), some formula fatigue is inevitable: One can only parody the hero’s journey so many times. Again, there are trippy sequences, a live-action segment, pop songs, and tongue-in-cheek celebrity cameos. The misadventures of SpongeBob and his pals and frenemies have be enough to sustain more than 200 continually rerun episodes of TV, but filling out a feature, even one that’s barely 80 minutes without credits, takes a lot of squeezing.
For those unfamiliar with SpongeBob, there is, of course, a song. He lives in a pineapple under the sea with Gary the snail. His best friend, Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke), is a dimwitted sea star. He works as a fry cook at the Krusty Krab for the miserly Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown), whose nemesis, the diminutive Plankton (Mr. Lawrence), is obsessed with stealing the secret Krabby Patty formula. The dyspeptic Squidward Q. Tentacles (Roger Bumpass), who is in fact an octopus, is SpongeBob’s neighbor and co-worker. Sandy (Carolyn Lawrence), a squirrel scientist who walks around in a space suit and lives in an air-filled dome, rounds out the core ensemble.
After Gary goes missing, SpongeBob and Patrick set off on to rescue him from King Poseidon’s undersea metropolis of vice, the Lost City Of Atlantic City, in a makeshift convertible driven by Otto (Awkwafina), a robot built by Sandy and reprogrammed by Plankton, who has come to realize that SpongeBob, not Mr. Krabs, is his true enemy. Altogether, this plotline amounts to just a little longer than the running time of a single SpongeBob episode. Perhaps with a little imagination, something might have been made of the road trip format, but the only thing it produces is a diverting live-action sequence in which SpongeBob and Patrick find themselves in a dusty Western town full of “zombie cowboy-pirates,” where they meet a wise tumbleweed (Keanu Reeves) and a demonic bandit outlaw named, well, El Diablo (Danny Trejo).
There are some good laughs in there (many courtesy of the reliably funny Berry, who also voiced a dolphin in the more manic The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out Of Water), but a lot of it feels like a movie treading water. The animation is for the most part effortless, striking a balance between the digital modeling of Sponge Out Of Water—which often made the characters look like they were molded from plastic—and the traditional flat style of the series. But there are too many montages and musical numbers that seem to be searching for a punchline.
Worst of all, the film often falls back on what has become the most obvious symptom of contemporary IP exhaustion: backstories for all the characters. Do we really need to know the psychological motivations of Squidward? The intentions of Sponge On The Run’s writer-director, Tim Hill, who helped the late Stephen Hillenburg develop the original series, might be noble. But the result mostly serves as a reminder than SpongeBob SquarePants, despite all the fun, is a lucrative modern media franchise like any other.
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Wanna feel old? The Original SpongeBob Squarepants: The Movie* is old enough to drive – and it came out a mere 5 years after the series started. Which means that Spongebob Squarepants, the franchise, is old enough to drink.
*(I took my younger brother to see that one. Funny!)
Tragic irony: The Spongebob movie can drive, yet Spongebob himself STILL keeps failing to get his license.
Mrs. Puff gave The SpongeBob Movie its license just before she was shipped off to jail (again).
But driving instructor, I am Spongebob.Roll on snare drum, everyone laugh.
My dad actually loved Spongebob and was trying to hide the fact that he wanted to go. I feel like even if my younger brothers didn’t want to go (personally I was at the stage of teenager-dom where you have to act like a little shit who doesn’t like anything) he would’ve invented an excuse to get us there.
It’s got some solid jokes here and there but it often feels too generic for a Spongebob film. However, any quibbles are forgot whenever Reeves is onscreen. He’s perfectly cast. I really enjoy John Wick and I’m looking forward to The Matrix: Rebooted (as it’ll surely be called) but between this, Toy Story 4 and Bill and Ted 3, it’s awesome to watch him just have fun.
In the SpongeBobverse, Poseidon & Neptune can both bow the hell down to Lord Royal Highness, a.k.a. David goddamn Bowie.
What’s everyone’s favorite SpongeBob line/exchange? Mine:Mr Krabs: “I’ve spent a lifetime in this restaurant, and there’s only one way out of here!”Patrick: “A high school diploma?”
The one me and my family quote all the time is the one where Spongebob and Patrick steal a balloon and go on the run with two bars of chocolate to last for the rest of their lives
It’s probably Patrick’s digression on Wumbo. “WUMBOLOGY, the study of Wumbo?”
Everything about the candy bar episode, really, but especially Patrick’s sales pitch of saying “I love you.” unprompted and with complete sincerity. (Which is met with a beat of silence before having the door closed in his face.)
A few years ago my daughter and her friends, in their version of being mischievous preteens, would yell “I LOVE YOU!!!” out the car window at random pedestrians (they are…not bad-ass children). I never realized that may be where they got it from.
Squidward: “The Hash-Slinging Slasher”SpongeBob: *misprounounces several times*Also, the F-U-N song (Plankton’s verses)“F is for fire that burns down the whole town, U is for uranium… bomb, N is for no survivors—-”
From Squidville: “I would rather tear out my brain stem, go to the nearest four-way intersection and skip rope with it than continue living where I live now.”
Angry Spongebob runs up to Patrick: Hey Patrick, are you mad?!?Patrick: Yeah!Spongebob: Why?IPatrick: I can’t see my forehead.I think it was the unenthusiastically angry look on Patrick’s face that did it for me. Only saw it the once some 15 years ago, but it stayed with me. “I Wumbo, you wumbo…he, she, me wumbo” also randomly pops into my head on a semi-regular basis.
Patrick teaching Spongebob how to adult with: “Now you must aquire a taste for freeform jazz.”.
Squidward: It’s just a stupid boulder!Spongebob: It’s not just a boulder (sniffles) it’s a rock.
This line almost always escapes my lips when I find myself liking something I’d been avoiding trying.
Do we really need to know the psychological motivations of Squidward?
Yes. Yes, we do.
We already do.See: Every episode with Squilliam.
I feel like this movie is pretty much what I expected the second Spongebob movie to be, and was pleasantly surprised that that wasn’t the case. Sponge Out of Water is some batshit insanity; a film that goes full on with a Mad Max parody midway through is one I can always get behind.
This new film seems tame in comparison.
If it is just coming out now, how was I able to see this (and be disapointed by it) months ago? Serious question, was this leaked online well in advance or something?
Depends on where you live. In markets such as Canada and South Korea, it was released in theaters around August on last year, then went to VOD afterwards.
Thank you.
I was wondering how I briefly lived in the future, and why seeing a crappy movie was the only benefit.
The first three seasons and the movie are really the only Spongebob content worth watching. It went downhill after that
I was a HUGE SpongeBob kid when it first came on and even back then, the post-movie episodes didn’t feel right to me.
I don’t know I found the movie to be only okay in the first place. You could probably (and I’m sure somebody already has) just clip the good parts into a youtube video and be better off
I remember the bit where the dried up Seahorses come back to (animated) life was really charming and cute, but it definitely wasn’t as funny as most episodes at the time. It’s also where Tom Kenny started squeakifying his Spongebob voice by 10℅ or so, for some reason.
But boy are those the gift that keeps on giving. I must have seen some of the episodes a hundred times and they are still an absolute delight. Whenever I get together with some friends who also love them some Nautical Nonsense, we put a couple episodes on and laugh our asses off.These days I find myself relating to Squidward more often than I care to. Which reminds me that I need to actively appreciate life more. Take a page or two from SpongeBob’s and also Patrick’s book (Sandy not so much… she’s too much of an overachiever. Love her too, though!).My point is: The shit holds up!
I heard Hillenberg rejoined the show at some point and it took an upswing in quality around then. I’ve heard good things about Season 10.
They already did the road trip story back in the first movie.
If there’s any show whose decline in quality is most disappointing, it’s Spongebob’s. The first three seasons are up there with classic Looney Tunes for some of the greatest 11-minute cartoon shorts ever created. There is not one weak episode in that entire initial run. Then all of that wit and humor seemed to disappear in an instant after Hillenburg left the show, and what could have been an amazing legacy left behind after the original movie is overshadowed by the hundreds of dumbed-down episodes that have come since. What’s worse is that it looks like the franchise is only going to be milked even further now that Hillenburg is no longer with us, whose passing still makes me sad.
I dunno, unlike The Simpsons, which I certainly still enjoy from time to time but feel never put episodes out to rival almost any golden age ep after Season 9, I feel while Spongebob certainly lost its quality control I can remember finding later eps like Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy VI: The Motion Picture, Back to the Past, Earworm, Not Normal and The Two Faces of Squidward about as funny as anything. I quite enjoyed the last movie too, which I believe Hillenberg was involved in, and I didn’t see much or any of them but I believe he got involved again for a Season or two around that time, and people felt there was a noticeable uptick in quality.Caveat; I’ve probably seen a third at most of the Season 4+ episodes, and indeed quite a few I saw ranged from mediocre to terrible, and generally do miss a lot of what made the character so appealing in the first place.
There is a more subtle drop off in Simpsons quality, past 9 they’re still pretty watchable through about 15-16 then they really get awful but have rebounded somewhat since they’ve seem to have found a groove, so post-25 they’re pretty good if you just accept what they are. Every time I catch a post-movie and then post-second movie you can feel the quality dwindle further and further but that’s also because they’ve just got far less material to work with. Also, what is with keeping animation on well past their prime? Is it because actors can age without it being an issue? It isn’t like the Looney Tunes kept making new material continuously. There was literally a 20+ year stretch where nothing new of substance was made, Mel Blanc doing the occasional cartoon was celebrated. I just don’t get why they’re so unwilling to let go of some of these while others slowly fade away (KotH and such).
Agree and disagree; I find most Simpsons watchable but I think there’s a pretty big and sudden drop in Season 10. I remember watching Treehouse of Horror IX and thinking “hmm, this doesn’t feel right” and I continued feeling that throughout the early part of the Season (“Kidney Trouble” etc), and it was never quite the same afterwards.As for why animation keeps going, I think most of it is the production advantages of the medium. In addition to that there absolutely is a precedent in the early days of the medium; the Disney staple, the Warner characters, Tom & Jerry, Popeye, Woody Woodpecker, even something as marginal as Heckle & Jekyll all had 20-30 year runs, and most peaked long before they stopped.I also think the relationship people have with animated characters is different from that of your average TV show. If you mention Bugs Bunny to someone will they say “those early ones are great, but they got pretty ropey towards the end there”. No, they’ll probably say something like “Yeah, he’s great, What’s Up Doc, ha ha!”. Similarly I bet a lot of people just think “I love that dysfunctional yellow family! D’oh!” or “I wish I was as enthusiastic about my job as Spongebob is!”. As far as I could tell much of the public reacted to getting 30 Seasons of The Simpsons on Disney+ as they would have to a Looney Tunes marathon twenty years ago; I like these, I will watch a lot of these.
Come on Ignatiy, Matt Berry is mentioned and there’s no ‘regular human bartender’ reference? This is the AV CLUB circa 2021!
As someone living in a sane part of Canada who was able to see this film safely in theaters last year, I’m just gonna say this now: Stay the f*ck away from this movie at all costs. Not because it’s truly awful, but because it turns out the whole film basically threw out Hillenburg’s original idea for it, and instead now exists as little more than a stealth advertisement for the disrespectful Kamp Koral spin-off that Hillenburg never wanted.I’m serious. Sure. looking at the trailer, there’s a section where they show how Spongebob met Gary at Kamp Koral, & that’s not too bad, since it’s just showing what Gary means to Spongebob & whatnot. But the climax of the film, with Spongebob being put on trial in a kangaroo court, has all the other characters stall for time by reminiscing about how they all met him at Kamp Koral, showing flashback sequences for all of them. And it last for at least a good ten f*cking minutes or so.It. Is. Shameless. I was actively flipping off the screen doing this obvious stealth ad. And it only made it more obvious by the fact that there didn’t seem to be any actual story or character development in the whole film. I mean, the villain is defeating by apparently pointing out that he doesn’t have friends, despite any kind of friendship (or the lack of) never having been established as a part of his character. There’s not even a real ending, we just cut to a snail montage set to another Weezer cover & that’s it. The whole film clearly exists just to push the Kamp Koral bits.And no, I don’t care if I spoiled the ending. F*ck this movie, & f*ck the ghouls behind it. Don’t give them your money or even your attention (as I remembered this is on a streaming service you might already be paying money to) for what is basically a commercial for a series that should not be surrounded by 80 minutes of filler. I don’t even care if your kids beg, just cough up for a month of Apple TV and flip on Wolfwalkers or something. Your kids & everyone else deserves much better.
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