“Who’s ready to set sail on another adventure making me money?” cries the stingy Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown), owner of the Krabby Patty, early on in The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run. Mr. Krabs’s crabbiest employee, Squidward (Rodger Bumpass), rolls his eyes, before squelching away from the underwater fast-food joint. It’s hard not to empathize with Squidward in the face of such a cynically mercenary film as this one, because the third feature based on Nickelodeon’s beloved animated series seems largely designed to appeal to adults, with recognizable stars appearing in live-action cameos alongside the iconic nautical characters.
When the vain King Poseidon (Matt Berry) kidnaps SpongeBob’s (Tom Kenny) beloved pet sea snail, Gary (also Kenny), to use his slime for skin care, SpongeBob and Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke) set off to rescue him from the Lost City of Atlantic City, a “scary, vice-ridden cesspool of moral depravity.” SpongeBob SquarePants fans will know how much Gary means to his owner, and flashbacks to the pair’s meet-cute at a summer camp spell this out with over-the-top earnestness. But Sponge on the Run, sometimes self-consciously, can’t manage to stay focused on that quest; there’s even a long gambling sequence in the Lost City of Atlantic City in which SpongeBob and Patrick discover that they can’t stay focused on it either.
The SpongeBob television series has always relished moments of randomness, and Sponge on the Run doesn’t lack for harmless kookiness, as when Patrick, introducing himself at one point, explains with ridiculous seriousness that “my name means toaster in Celtic.” That kind of loony logic, though, emerged most effectively in past SpongeBob properties as a collection of lovable, idiosyncratic character traits. Here, the storytelling itself is nonsensical.
It’s less a case of distraction than delirium once Snoop Dogg and Keanu Reeves show up in a lengthy unhinged dream sequence in which a burning tumbleweed with the latter’s face inside of it challenges SpongeBob and Patrick to free a hip-hop dance squad of flesh-eating zombie pirates from the saloon of El Diablo (Danny Trejo). Incomprehensibility, however, doesn’t equate to purposelessness, since the celebrity cameos seem to have been shoved in for marketing purposes. The abdication of the plot in the last half-hour in favor of a sequence of flashbacks to summer camp also seems part of a money-making adventure, as Kamp Koral, a prequel spinoff of the TV series, is releasing alongside this film.
What’s always been weirdest and most wonderful about SpongeBob SquarePants is that it offers a kid’s-eye-view of sea creatures navigating adulthood. By contrast, Sponge on the Run veers between abandoning the series’s signature irreverence for bland soupiness and demanding that the audience grow up if they want to keep up (take, for example, a crude post-festivities reference to “people who pass out and sleep in their own vomit all night”).
Only rarely does Sponge on the Run find that classic sweet-spot of treating kids as capable of understanding sophisticated humor while also allowing them to relish in the sillier slapstick. The series’s wry brand of meta-storytelling is at times effectively on display here, as when Patrick and SpongeBob are shown a scene-shifting glimpse into the “Window of Meanwhile,” and when they squabble over whether their expedition will turn out to be more like a buddy movie or a singular hero’s journey. But the pair might be disappointed to learn that their disjointed, dull quest follows no such satisfying structure. If the SpongeBob franchise has finally gone on the run, it seems like it’s left the audience that matters most in the dust.
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