The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants

Jan 2 – 8

Friday 3:30 & 7 pm
Saturday 1:30 & 7 pm
Sunday 1:30 & 7 pm
Monday 7 pm
Tuesday 7 pm
Wednesday 3:30
Thursday 7 pm

Rated PG – 1hr 28min

Family / Comedy

There is a reason SpongeBob SquarePants has spent the better part of three decades permanently lodged in our cultural subconscious. He is joy personified, a relentless optimist with the heart of a child, the soul of a dreamer, and the charisma of someone who genuinely believes every day can be the best day ever. The SpongeBob Movie: Search for Squarepants is a wildly goofy, visually explosive, nonstop sugar rush of a movie. It’s silly, sweet, and a little stuck in the past. Younger audiences will laugh from the opening scene through to the closing credits. Adults will enjoy pockets of nostalgic delight, while occasionally feeling like they have been tossed into a blender set to maximum chaos.

The story opens on what feels like a typical day in Bikini Bottom. SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) wakes up buzzing with excitement because he has grown. Not figuratively. Literally. He has gained just enough height to finally ride a massive rollercoaster that has taunted him for so long. To him, it is not about a theme park thrill, but proving he is ready to join the ranks of big guys everywhere. And yet, when faced with the towering monstrosity of the ride, canons firing and riders screaming, his courage evaporates in a blink. He panics. He lies to Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke). He retreats. In true SpongeBob fashion, his self-confidence shatters over something that feels both ridiculous and entirely understandable.

Enter Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown), the master of tough love. After mocking the idea that height equals bravery, he flashes his prized swashbuckler certificate. In his youth, long before fast food capitalism consumed his soul, Mr. Krabs lived as a fearless pirate who once rode alongside the legendary Flying Dutchman (voiced with hilarious menace by Mark Hamill).

Of course, this lecture goes exactly how you think it would. SpongeBob accidentally summons the Flying Dutchman himself, and suddenly he and Patrick find themselves whisked away on a ghostly pirate ship to the Underworld, where the Dutchman sees SpongeBob’s naivety and gullibility as the perfect tools to help him break a 500-year curse.

The SpongeBob Movie: Search for Squarepants is the most ridiculous and funniest SpongeBob film since the first silver screen adaptation in 2004. SpongeBob and Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke) are flattened, molded, blended, squeezed through tubes and sucked into the underworld. Written by Matt Lieberman and Pam Brady, the latter whose collective credits include Hot Rod, South Park, and Team America, the film utilizes SpongeBob’s malleability as a defining through line.

Sure, the film has some lessons to dole out about accepting yourself for both your strengths and weaknesses (and how those weaknesses are actually strengths, given the right circumstances), but, really, The Search for SquarePants is just a raucously good time punctuated by a bevy of butt jokes. In a film that gets mileage simply out of the escalating desperation with which SpongeBob blinks his eye, how complicated does its messaging need to be? We all need a really good laugh, and Drymon and company deliver.

For the youngest fans, it will be the cinematic equivalent of a Krabby Patty with extra cheese. For the rest of us, it is an amusing but forgettable snack, enjoyable in the moment and quickly washed away with the tide. Because in the end, SpongeBob does not need to reinvent himself to remain beloved. He simply needs to believe in himself. And that’s a pertinent message always worthy of cinematic celebration.