Mark Reviews Movies: THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SPONGE ON THE RUN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 3, 2021

The nice thing about the world of SpongeBob SquarePants, the sea sponge (that just looks like an ordinary cleaning sponge and wears, obviously, pants that fit the shape) who lives in a pineapple somewhere under the sea, is that it takes little time and even less effort to figure out what this world is like, whom everyone within it is, and what the entire purpose of the premise is. The animated TV show, created by the late Stephen Hillenburg (who's given a dedication at the end of this movie), has run for 13 seasons over the course of 22 years, with more than 250 episodes, and before this new movie, there have been two other feature films.

On paper, those numbers might seem a bit intimidating, especially when it comes to whatever The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run has in store. There's no reason for intimidation, though, because everything one needs to know about this world, these characters, and the setup of the story comes right at the start. The catch-up portion of this movie, which takes the world and those characters into the third dimension of computer animation, only lasts about a minute or two, too. This critic, who has never seen a full episode of the series and can only recall seeing—and enjoying—the first film, was appropriately caught up on the basics of the back story and the tone immediately.

Something eventually, though, starts to feel a bit off about this semi-reboot of the material, and that's a feeling even the barely-initiated can sense. It's all good fun at the start, at least.

We quickly meet our hapless but good-natured hero SpongeBob (voice of Tom Kenny), who still lives in a pineapple under the sea next door to his best friend Patrick (voice of Bill Fagerbakke), a pink starfish with plenty of self-esteem issues. In between their houses, actually, is the home of the ill-tempered Squidward (voice of Rodger Bumpass), whose name seems self-explanatory—except that he's an octopus. SpongeBob and Patrick repeatedly yell, "Good morning," to each other, and when Squidward asks them to keep it down, the two friends, of course, offer a friendly morning greeting to him, too.

SpongeBob and Squidward work at a fast food restaurant run by the money-obsessed Mr. Krabs (voice of Clancy Brown), a crab, naturally, who has a secret formula for his famous sandwich the Krabby Patty. Whether or not the meat is actual crab or just ordinary hamburger is left to our potentially horrified imagination.

Mr. Krabs' rival is Plankton (voice of Mr. Lawrence), a tiny, one-eyed creature who runs a far-less successful diner and has gone through thousands of evil plans trying to steal the Krabby Patty recipe. There's also a squirrel from Texas named Sandy (voice of Carolyn Lawrence), who lives under a glass dome in the water and wears a spacesuit to interact with her friends.

All of this is important to explain, perhaps, because the movie, while looking quite a bit different from this material's previous incarnations, gives us a good sense of the everyday comic adventures of these characters. The whole thing is absurd and sometimes surreal, and while the characters and backdrops here lose much of the colorful pop that defined the show and the previous movies' traditional animation, writer/director Tim Hill and the animators ensure that the computer-generated animation possesses a shaky and occasionally skippy nature, more akin to animated puppetry than clean and shiny computer animation.

It's fun enough, in other words, and then the plot gets into gear. Hill's story, beginning with Plankton abducting SpongeBob's pet snail and giving it to King Poseidon (voice of Matt Berry) to be used as a facial treatment, takes SpongeBob and Patrick on a series of random adventures on the way to and within the Lost City of Atlantic City, Poseidon's casino-filled realm. Most of it is still absurd and surreal, of course, from their encounter with cowboy-pirate zombies in a ghost town (during a sequence that mixes animation with live-action) to a long night of gambling and other revelry in the city. These few excursions, though, come across as half-baked ideas, filling in the gaps of an unfortunately essential plot.

These characters are more at home, well, at home, where the comedy comes from the world and these odd creatures, instead of from big, action-filled setpieces and several celebrity cameos (Most notably, Keanu Reeves plays Sage, a wise head inside a sagebrush, but Danny Trejo shows up, as do the voices of Awkwafina and Tiffany Haddish, as an emcee named Tiffany Haddock). The whole adventure climaxes with a series of flashbacks to the characters in their youth, and the cynical among us might see this lengthy sequence as an extended advertisement for a spin-off show (not-so-coincidentally premiering the same day as the movie's release).

The last thing one wants to feel with material that starts as effortlessly charming and uniquely odd as this is cynicism. The new look of The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run may have dulled the colors of this world, but more importantly, this particular story and its focus on making things as big as possible ultimately dull the material's absurdist energy.

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