For those who don’t know, Spongebob Squarepants is a ludicrous Nickelodeon cartoon about anthropomorphic sea creatures who live in an undersea town called Bikini Bottom.
The title character (Tom Kenny) is a jolly, childlike sea/kitchen sponge who works at a restaurant called the Krusty Krab along with his indifferent, self-obsessed octopus neighbor, Squidward (Rodger Bumpass). They work under the supervision of money-obsessed crustacean Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown) whose sworn enemy is his envious business rival, Plankton (Mr. Lawrence).
Spongebob and his other neighbor, dimwitted starfish Patrick Star (Bill Fagerbakke), are best buddies who are both friends with a squirrel named Sandy Cheeks (Carolyn Lawrence), who lives in an underwater dome and wears a diving suit when she steps outside.
The series began in 1999; went on hiatus in 2002; ended in 2004 with a theatrical feature film; and was unfortunately revived the following year with a new and inferior creative team due to its popularity.
Since then, the franchise has been a zombie. It’s still slogging along, but it’s lost its smarts. New episodes are released every year, but all the clever stupidity from the first three seasons has been replaced by plain stupidity. However, kids still love the iconic sponge who lives in a pineapple under the sea.
Disturbingly, even during the superior first three seasons, the writers were sneaking in aberrant sexual innuendos. I didn’t catch them when I was a kid, but along with the morbid and gross humor, they make me question whether kids really should be watching Spongebob.
After a decade, I see Spongebob as the biggest cash-grab in Nickelodeon history. This second feature film, Sponge Out of Water, can’t affirm this opinion more. Due to my childhood obsession with the series, I’ve seen so many episodes and TV specials that this recent movie left me with few surprises.
I’ve already seen an angry mob attempt to pop a bubble that Spongebob has blown. I’ve already seen Plankton literally get inside Spongebob’s head. I’ve seen Spongebob teach a valuable lesson to Plankton through song (and this time it’s not nearly as memorable as “The F.U.N. Song”); I’ve seen Spongebob and his friends become superheroes; and I’ve seen them make the transition to dry land…twice!
The series has never been known for its continuity, but the filmmakers (writer/director Paul Tibbitt; writers Glenn Berger, Johnathan Aibel, and Steven Hillenberg; and the Nickelodeon executives) could have done something more than recycle everything that’s been done, have the characters act like it hasn’t been done, and call it good enough to release in theaters.
At the least, I certainly haven’t seen CGI/live-action superhero versions of Spongebob and the gang battling a pirate played by Antonio Banderas in the streets of a seaside city! Yet, this whole sequence is marketed as one of the movie’s selling points, but it doesn’t arrive until the final act; it should have been saved as the film’s biggest surprise.
I also haven’t seen Bikini Bottom become a post-apocalyptic wasteland with leather costumes and failed sacrifices to the “krabby patty gods” due to the secret formula of the krabby patty, the most popular item on the Krusty Krab’s menu, being stolen…again.
The attempted theft of the secret formula has not only been a major plot line throughout the series, it was successfully pulled off in the previous movie. Why can’t the filmmakers come up with something new to put at stake?
That’s not to say that I wasn’t laughing throughout. The scene that I thought was the funniest was actually the very beginning, where Banderas dodges booby traps like Indiana Jones and ends up in a short-lived fistfight with a skeleton! (How exactly does this pirate play into the story? Well, I don’t want to spoil everything.)
Sadly, I found this scene of cartoony live-action silliness funnier than any of the actual cartoony silliness. The absurd humor is funny, but that’s all that the movie is: absurdity. The characters are big jokes, and the rest of the humor is bizarre, and sometimes crude and morbid. While a Chaplin film can provide laughs and emotional weight, Sponge Out of Water is all laughs with no substance.
Last year’s The Lego Movie is also absurd, but its humor and characters are both more clever than a toy-based movie has any right to be. The Lego Movie also contains a strong message about non-conformity at its core. Though Sponge Out of Water delivers a message about teamwork, the whole movie is pointlessness upon pointlessness.
After the climax, it appears as if one prominent character has fundamentally changed, and I was relieved because there was finally a reason for this story to exist! And then, in the very next scene, he’s gone back to his old ways. I suppose the filmmakers can’t take risks that would disrupt the formula of the TV show.
If this is what the franchise has to offer, I say that it should have been left alone after the first film, as it was meant to be. The nautical nonsense is enough for an eleven-minute episode, or even an hour-long TV special, but there’s nothing in here that justifies a theatrical movie.
The younger Spongebob fans in the audience might enjoy the movie more than I did (though the youngest members might be disturbed by the menacing situations). Then again, there are other shows out there that are more wholesome for kids than this.
The post Movie Review: The Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out of Water appeared first on PHATMASS.
