Film review: The Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out Of Water

First of all, in the interests of fairness: I have never been able to stomach the SpongeBob cartoon.

 

THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SPONGE OUT OF WATER

Director: Paul Tibbitt
Cast: Antonio Banderas, Tom Kenny, Bill Fagerbakke, Roger Bumpass, Mr Lawrence
Rating: (PG)
Three and a half stars (out of five)

 

Whenever I have stumbled across it while channel surfing, I have quickly moved on.

So when I turned up for The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (Rialto and Reading cinemas) I was expecting to get really annoyed and totally lost.

Cunningly, the film found an amusing device to introduce the uninitiated (such as myself) to the wacky citizens of Bikini Bottom, and then it held back on how annoying SpongeBob is as a character.

It is a short film at just 93 minutes, and, surprisingly, I did not spend the entire time wishing I was somewhere else.

For the people who already like SpongeBob and his gang there is much more to like: the gags (which are more for the adults than the kids) hold up, the animation is as trippy as any ex-hippy could wish for and the storyline zigs and zags in the loopy logic of the original, yet still makes sense at the end.

If you need to know: Plankton is once again after the secret formula for Krabby patties.

It would be a triumph except the jokes were so thinly spread they almost might as well not have been there at all.

I left feeling underwhelmed: so much about Sponge Out of Water had been charming and pleasant but it never made me laugh out loud.

More seriously, none of the kids I saw it with seemed to find it any funnier than I did.

- Christine Powley

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