There’s a good chance that you know exactly how much you’ll like “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water” right now, before you even set foot in the theater.
If you aren’t calibrated to SpongeBob creator Stephen Hillenburg’s particular brand, “Sponge Out of Water” will do little to convert you. The film’s only departure from its source material is the addition of live-action segments that revolve around a pirate named Burger Beard (Antonio Banderas, seriously). These segments, if anything, are even more juvenile and bizarre — and less comedic — than their animated counterparts. Those who walk in proclaiming that they “just don’t get it” will be rewarded with 90 minutes of thorough befuddlement.
For the initiated, though, the film is largely a success. If you are under the age of nine and/or consider the antics of SpongeBob SquarePants a central part of your childhood, you will walk away satisfied. Directed by Paul Tibbitt, “Sponge Out of Water” mostly retains the freewheeling surrealism of Hillenburg’s much-loved cartoon while sprinkling in a few inspired songs and a riff on Hollywood’s current fixation with the post-apocalyptic.
The story is loose, simple and much less essential to the picture’s success than the hero’s journey in 2004’s “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.” The film opens with a frame story concerning Burger Beard and his Indiana Jones-style quest through the tropics in search of a magical book. He is accompanied by a grating chorus of anthropomorphic seagulls who do little but provide the film with its due of low humor and weigh down its otherwise sprightly pace.
Inside the book that Burger Beard finds is our major narrative thread, and it’s a familiar one: a story set in Bikini Bottom that revolves around SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) and Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown) protecting the Krabby Patty secret formula from rival restaurant owner Plankton (Mr. Lawrence). This template, well-worn over the series’ run, receives a kink when Plankton successfully steals the formula, only to have it mysteriously disappear before his and SpongeBob’s eyes.
No formula means no Krabby Patties, and Bikini Bottom is immediately seized with panic by the ensuing burger drought. This is the source of one of the film’s best visual gags: when the public learns that the secret formula is lost, the landscape is immediately set ablaze and the characters are suddenly clad in the 1980s post-apocalyptic leather garb of George Miller’s “Mad Max.” The series has always been particularly astute when dealing with consumer culture, and here it takes two ripe targets — the public’s relationship with fast food and Hollywood’s current tendency to use dystopian narratives as knee-jerk templates — and skewers them with admirable ease.
With the formula gone, Mr. Krabs insists that Plankton stole it himself, and SpongeBob is forced to join forces with his nemesis in order to clear his name. The pair’s teamwork (a word Plankton consistently mispronounces) provides the bulk of the film’s action, and it is thoroughly inspired. A time-travel sequence with an intergalactic stop-motion dolphin and music from Pharrell Williams and N.E.R.D is a weird, wonderful highlight — exactly the kind of thing one would expect from the creators of a show that once cast David Bowie as the king of Atlantis.
When the focus turns away from SpongeBob and Plankton, however, things start to fall apart. We are taken to dry land as the film’s animated and live-action narratives intertwine, and our aquatic heroes get a 3-D upgrade to take on Banderas’s Burger Beard. The film’s manic energy, so charming and genuinely funny in two dimensions, becomes too much here, and a subpar production design doesn’t help to keep things afloat. When each of the main players develops a superhero alter ego to take down Burger Beard, the proceedings officially collapse under their own unwieldiness.
When the live-action gimmick was announced, there were fears that it was nothing more than a cynical cash grab, and it unfortunately seems those fears were justified. Thankfully, though, this gimmick only takes up about 15 percent of the film’s total runtime, so SpongeBob purists rejoice.
As it stands, “Sponge Out of Water” is a fast, funny, pleasingly faithful extension of the SpongeBob mythos that has unfortunately kept from scaling to the heights of its cinematic predecessor or the series’ best episodes by its superfluous foray into the third dimension. If nautical nonsense be something you wish, you’ll find it here in spades. Just expect to walk away slightly waterlogged.
“The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water” opens on Friday.
