Keanu Reeves helps make 3rd SpongeBob film a delight.
Coming up on a quartercentury as a pop culture mainstay, Nickelodeon icon SpongeBob SquarePants continues to stubbornly, dare I say squarely, embody a chipper wholesomeness that feels entirely out of step with the moment and yet utterly timeless. That contradiction at the heart of the late Stephen Hillenburg’s animated creation is probably what explains its enduring appeal, and it’s what makes the character’s third feature film, “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run,” work a lot better than it otherwise should.
The film — opening Thursday, March 4, as one of the first original offerings for the newly rebranded streaming service Paramount+ (formerly CBS All Access) — wraps itself up within the cozy confines of what the series has offered since its 1999 debut. What’s new and different about it is not the story, but the format in which it’s told. For the first time, SpongeBob and his pals have left behind the comfortable trappings of traditional cel animation and made the leap to CGI.
The transition is nowhere near as jarring as it could have been. You might say he takes to it like a sponge to water.
“Sponge on the Run,” which follows 2004’s “The SpongeBob Movie” and 2015’s “Sponge Out of Water,” drops us back into the underwater town of Bikini Bottom, where our title hero (voiced by Tom Kenny) makes his way as a shortorder cook at the Krusty Krab alongside his best buddy, lunkheaded starfish Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke).
The action kicks off when SpongeBob’s pet snail Gary is abducted and taken to the lost realm of Atlantic City, whose narcissistic king, Poseidon (Matt Berry), is in desperate need of snail slime to maintain his youthful complexion. To rescue his beloved friend, SpongeBob and Patrick set off on a new adventure, along with their helpful spirit guide Sage, a tumbleweed with the face of a liveaction Keanu Reeves, who is delightful in every scene he rolls into.
With witty banter and digressions aplenty, “Sponge on the Run” leans into the “movie” part of its title in terms of the scale of the canvas it paints on (including liveaction dropins by Snoop Dogg and Danny Trejo), while preserving the essence of what has made these characters beloved for so long.
If anything, the film is so deeply etched in the cement of SpongeBob’s mythology that it appears to be aimed only at audiences that have spent some of the past two decades navigating the various interrelationships among the denizens of Bikini Bottom. From Squidward (Roger Bumpass) to Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown) and Sandy Cheeks (Carolyn Lawrence), all the favorites are back, but their connections to one another, and to SpongeBob, won’t amount to much for anyone coming into the film cold. However, the movie does take on a bit of brand management, using several
extended flashbacks as a notsosubtle preview for the streamer’s “Kamp Koral” prequel series, which also premieres Thursday.
“Sponge on the Run” is very much a membersonly affair. Then again, three movies and several hundred TV episodes into a 22yearold franchise, it’s not unreasonable to think the audience for this adventure is pretty well baked into the cake.
Under the helm of director Tim Hill, who codeveloped the original show and cowrote the first feature, the movie is resolutely true to itself and to the spirit of candycolored anarchy that has informed its main character from the very beginning.
He might be the recipient of a newly CGId spitandpolish, but he’s still squarely, stubbornly SpongeBob. And that’s not a bad thing. For everyone else, there’s Keanu Reeves.