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

Key Highlights

• 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.
• Related Stories Tig Notaro Says She's Writing a 'Hot Lesbian Action' Movie With Zack Snyder 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.