The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants Review: A Disappointing Kids Movie
Are you ready, kids? It’s time to once again say “Aye, aye, captain” as we return to Bikini Bottom for The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants, the fourth theatrically released SpongeBob film. This film follows SpongeBob’s quest to prove that he’s a “big guy” by joining the Flying Dutchman on a quest, while Mr. Krabs leads Squidward and Gary on a mission to save him from the Dutchman’s trap. While children will have a blast with this film, the parents and childless adults in the audience may have a lesser time with this poor entry into the SpongeBob movie series.
I write this review as a massive fan of the SpongeBob TV series. Like many, I believe the first three seasons of the show are some of the best children’s TV ever produced, and the episodes make me laugh to this day. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004) remains a phenomenal film. However, many noticed that after that first movie, the show’s quality started to decline, and in my opinion, so did the movies. 2015’s Sponge Out of Water had a few good jokes and a fun superhero angle in the final act, and upon rewatching 2020’s Sponge on the Run, I found it to be a disaster. Search for SquarePants is a slight improvement from Sponge On the Run, but this franchise is a far cry from what it used to be.
The movie opens with SpongeBob measuring his height and realizing he’s tall enough to ride the roller coaster, officially qualifying him as a “big guy”. Something that is often easy to forget is that SpongeBob is not a child; he’s an adult who acts childish. It’s weird to write him going through an obstacle that only children go through. When it’s time to ride the roller coaster, SpongeBob backs out because he’s too afraid, and when Mr. Krabs reveals his own adventures as a swashbuckler, SpongeBob wants to do the same so that he can be a big guy. Now, the way “big guy” exists throughout this movie is so strange. Every few minutes, characters talk about becoming a “big guy,” and it sounds so unnatural every time they say it.
Let’s think about the “why” of every time SpongeBob goes on a journey in his movies. In the first film, he goes on a journey to save Mr. Krabs’s life. In the second movie, it’s to save Bikini Bottom from an apocalypse. In the third movie, SpongeBob needs to get his snail back, so the stakes are personal. In Search for SquarePants, why does SpongeBob go on his adventure? To find the courage to go on a roller coaster. Or, in other words, to become a big guy! The stakes in this story do not work at all. What are the consequences if he fails? He…doesn’t go on a roller coaster that he was already scared of going on? Oh, I know! He doesn’t become a big guy!
One of the many things that bothered me about this film is its total disregard for SpongeBob continuity. The Flying Dutchman is one of the main characters in this film, and when he and SpongeBob meet, it’s very clear that this is their first time meeting. But this doesn’t make any sense! The Flying Dutchman is a recurring character in the TV series who has met SpongeBob countless times. One of the funniest, all-time great episodes of the show is “Shanghaied”, the one where SpongeBob, Patrick, and Squidward end up on the Dutchman’s ship.
If this was the direction they wanted to take SpongeBob, the Flying Dutchman should not have been in this movie. It should have been a different character because the movie is using the likeness of an existing character from the show, and also asking us to throw away every previous scene where he’s existed. Mark Hamill does an excellent job as the voice of the Dutchman, but even he seems to be doing an impression of Brian Murray.
Parts of the movie have some fun with the Dutchman, but a lot of the film misunderstands what makes him so funny. He’s a sadistic, scary villain who gets annoyed by SpongeBob and Patrick, but has a strangely “normal” side. It’s even funnier that SpongeBob isn’t scared of the Dutchman at all, such as the episode where the Dutchman is about to take him to Davy Jones’s locker, and SpongeBob jabbers so much about jellyfishing and Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy that the Dutchman has to give him back right away because he’s too fed up with him.
Their dynamic isn’t played for nearly enough laughs here. But as for the laughs, they’re mainly for the kids, not for the adults who loved the well-written humor for all ages that seasons 1-3 of the show are famous for. Search for SquarePants has jokes like Mr. Krabs saying, “It’s under there!” and Squidward saying, “Under where?” Get it? Because he said “underwear”? Every young child in my theater laughed so hard at that one. Another joke in this movie is two characters going “Forever!” “Forever forever?” “Forever forever forever!” “Forever forever forever forever?” This is the low-hanging fruit we’re dealing with here. These are the jokes six-year-olds say to each other as a break from their 6-7 jokes.
As for the gags, this movie has a lot of them, but it has a lot of everything. The animation is vibrant and colorful, even if I wish these movies had stayed with the 2D style of the show. There’s a lot of action in here, too, but this film falls into a category of animated children’s entertainment that I’ve been seeing lately with movies like 2025’s Smurfs and some of those Trolls films. I call it sensory overload, where everything needs to be bursting with color, and there needs to be so many gags and action and music that we can’t have any sort of stillness for a single second.
These movies are loud, and this can’t be said for all children’s animated films. Zootopia 2 just came out, and that’s a movie with a lot of action and chases and excitement, but it knows how to slow down at the right moments to humanize everything and provide some gravitas. That movie doesn’t have a boring moment. Search for SquarePants is flying through a million things a minute. This specific type of pacing is so scared to let children be bored for even a second that it always needs to be throwing something at the screen. And they succeeded because kids won’t be bored during this film. As an adult, it can be a bit tiring not to have quieter moments in these films.
What about the characters? Funnily enough, Sandy Cheeks and Plankton are almost entirely absent from this film. I suppose Nickelodeon thinks we’ve had enough of them lately with their recent stand-alone Netflix films. Mr. Krabs has a bigger role in this film as he leads the quest to find SpongeBob, and I’ve always loved Clancy Brown’s work as this character. SpongeBob and Patrick have always been childish, but their writing, in both several modern show episodes and this movie, often makes them frustratingly infantile. There’s a whole storyline about the Dutchman drawing a rift between them that never gets fully resolved.
There’s a list of all the brave traits that SpongeBob wants to earn for himself. He has to complete a bunch of challenges to do that, but the movie montages through everything too quickly, and it’s not satisfying to see him do any of this as a result. That’s the drawback of such a fast pace; you can’t slow down enough to let an emotion sit with an audience. Before you can even process anything, whether it’s victory, defeat, or anything in between, the movie is already off and ready to show you something else.
By the time the movie reaches its third act, it ties up a storyline in a decent way. Some of the green screen is horrendous, and part of me wants to excuse it by saying, “Maybe it’s part of the joke,” but I couldn’t tell. The characters in the background are so clearly not in the same environment as the ones in the foreground, which isn’t just obvious through the compositing, but also in the performances of the background actors. But this movie isn’t a total loss; there’s some entertainment here with the action and the adventure that kids will love. There’s just a better version of it that should be out in theaters instead.
SCORE: 4/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 4 equates to “Poor.” The negatives outweigh the positive aspects, making it a struggle to get through.
Disclosure: ComingSoon attended a press screening for our The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants review.
Source: Comingsoon.net