95 min | PG | March 4, 2021 | Paramount+
SpongeBob’s pet snail Gary gets snatched by a vain sea king, so SpongeBob and Patrick set off for the Lost City of Atlantic City to bring him home. Keanu Reeves shows up as a talking tumbleweed and plays it completely straight. The journey is more interesting than the reason for it.
SpongeBob’s pet snail Gary vanishes from Bikini Bottom. King Poseidon has taken him, and SpongeBob recruits Patrick for a road trip to the Lost City of Atlantic City to get him back. The journey is the engine, but the film keeps stopping it. Tim Hill builds the movie as a series of detours, including an extended flashback to summer camp where SpongeBob and Patrick first met. The result is less a quest than a clip reel that occasionally remembers it has a destination.
Tom Kenny voices SpongeBob with the same manic optimism that has defined the character for two decades, and the full CG render does not blunt the elasticity of the performance. Bill Fagerbakke plays Patrick as a willing accomplice who never grasps the stakes, which keeps the friendship sincere instead of sappy. Keanu Reeves appears as Sage, a mystical talking tumbleweed who dispenses guidance from inside a tumbleweed, and he plays the gag with the deadpan calm of a man who knows exactly how absurd it is. Mr. Lawrence gives Plankton a side scheme that runs parallel to the main plot. Clancy Brown’s Mr. Krabs and Rodger Bumpass’s Squidward get little to do because the film leaves Bikini Bottom early.
Tim Hill directs from his own screenplay, working from a story by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger. The shift to full CG animation is the most consequential craft decision in the film. The new render gives Bikini Bottom depth and texture the flat television show never had, and Hill uses the freedom to push the camera through underwater environments in long unbroken moves. The summer camp flashback softens the characters into younger, rounder designs and shoots them in warm sunset light that signals nostalgia before a line of dialogue does. The animation is the most confident thing on screen.
The film works best when it trusts the surreal logic that built the show. The Atlantic City sequence and the Reeves bit land because they commit to nonsense without explaining it. The story around them is thin, and the camp flashback exists to manufacture an emotional bond that the characters already demonstrate through their actions. This is a competent feature built on a weak structure. It coasts on twenty years of accumulated affection for SpongeBob, and that affection mostly carries it.