‘The SpongeBob Movie: Search For SquarePants’ Review: It’s SpongeBob on a Pirate Adventure, but With Most of the Joy Squeezed Out

It might be an exaggeration to say that “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants” is the movie that finally squeegees the life out of SpongeBob SquarePants. But watching this friendly yet rather toothless adventure, with its jokes that simply don’t pop the way they used to, you can feel SpongeBob sliding into the zone of a harebrained yet rote elder statesman of high-energy juvenilia. He’s still a beguiling doofus who, as voiced by Tom Kenny, sounds like Daffy Duck on laughing gas, and there’s still an appealing aura of arrested kitsch to the now shiny and digital “SpongeBob” world. (For reasons I can’t quite analyze, it was better when it was drawn.) But the original “SpongeBob” series, and several of the previous big-screen adaptations (including the last one, “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run”), struck much funnier notes of flippant irresponsibility.

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Back in 2011, when the original Nickelodeon TV series “SpongeBob SquarePants” got called on the carpet by a study in Pediatrics magazine, which found that the show was damaging the attention span of 4-year-olds, it wasn’t just the cartoon’s lickety-split rhythms that raised eyebrows; so did its attitude of amoral imbecility. “SpongeBob SquarePants” had been around since 1999, and when the show started it was revolutionary: an under-the-sea slice of surrealist anarchy. SpongeBob himself was a wide-eyed dopey mascot of fun, but there was an aggression to the world he moved through, and that spirit began to take over the universe of kiddie cartoons. (A show like the Disney Channel’s rollicking “Big City Greens” is unthinkable without “SpongeBob.”) In a sense, all of this can be traced back to the meta cut-out fruitcake smartitude of “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” and “SpongeBob” honored that legacy by showcasing its characters with total affection even as they came off as borderline nuts.

In “Search for SquarePants,” our cheerfully oblivious hero has crossed a threshold: He is now 36 clams tall. Which means that he’s tall enough to ride the rollercoaster at Captain Booty Beard’s Fun Park. But instead of reveling in this opportunity as he gets in line for the coaster, SpongeBob freaks out, his underlying dread cued to the audience by the “O Fortuna” fanfare from Carmina Burana. That’s a promising joke, and the whole movie will now be organized around SpongeBob’s desire to overcome his fear and become a big guy.

Unfortunately, the opportunity he’s handed to do this hinges on the Flying Dutchman, a cursed pirate voiced by Mark Hamill with a mustache-twirling, ahoy-matey bravura so generic that he never quite sparks to life as a character. “Search for Squarepants” is a swashbuckler, which feels like a standard and rather fuddy-duddy genre for a “SpongeBob” movie. The Flying Dutchman, a recurring presence on the series since Season One, is a phosphorescent green ghost who has struck a deal with the devil. The only way he can free himself from being a mangy pirate is by tricking an “innocent” into climbing to the top of an underwater mountain. And SpongeBob, with his big-guy dreams, is gullible enough to do it, even as the redoubtable Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown), along with Squidward (Rodger Bumpass), charter a boatmobile Winnebago and go on a mission to save him.  

This is a movie in which Davy Jones’s Locker is located in a men’s locker room. In which SpongeBob and Gary the Snail have a conversation about string cheese, and the Flying Dutchman goes crazy at the sheer inanity of it. In which the characters get stuck in a “What would I do? What would you do?” conversational loop that’s pure kiddie Abbott and Costello. That last gag is pretty funny, but too much of “Search for SquarePants” lacks the exquisite dementia of the early years of the series, when the show’s creator, Stephen Hillenburg (who died in 2018), was running the happenings in Bikini Bottom. Don Drymon, the director of “Search for SquarePants,” was one of the show’s founding creative talents, and he certainly knows how to keep the butt jokes popping, but I’m sorry, they are not surprising butt jokes. “Search for SquarePants,” while it has amusing moments, is mostly SpongeBob treading water.