Directed By Derek Drymon

Starring – Tom Kenny, Bill Fagerbakke, Clancy Brown

The Plot – SpongeBob (Kenny) journeys to the ocean’s depths to face the Flying Dutchman’s ghost (Mark Hamill), encountering challenges and uncovering marine mysteries.

Rated PG for crude humor, action and some scary images

The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants | Official Trailer (2025)

POSITIVES

In an age where beloved animated properties are trading in the nostalgic warmth of their creative and presentational foundations for an upgraded deviation catering to a new generation of audience, “SpongeBob SquarePants” remains a maintained presence in the public eye, with its exaggerated sensibilities and undersea adventures involving all of its colorful characters, and while “Search for SquarePants” is far from the best of the four film adaptations in this popular franchise, it effectively brandishes the very same big screen appeal that makes the property feel bigger and bolder than ever, all the while maintaining that air of familiarity that will accommodate its fandom in all of the right places. For starters, the presentation plays effervescently luminous and intoxicating with its distinct brand of three-dimensional animation, giving the characters and their expressive emphasis a much-needed pulse of bombastic energy and dazzling radiance that caters cohesively to the design of many of the movie’s visual sight gags, all the while bringing the personality of Drymon’s exhilaratingly manic direction vigorously to life. While seeing this movie in 3D didn’t exactly inspire anything artistically ambitious to the interpretation, the animated designs on their own merits are so beautifully illustrated and meticulously detailed towards fleshing out a bigger scope and scale on this previously established sea setting, granting unyielding justification to release this film in theaters, instead of Paramount Plus, and as a result, the ocean is as fantastically animated as ever, as the production continues to elevate its appeal with the latest in technology to giving fans that distinct cinematic experience. Aside from artistic flourishes, the friendship of SpongeBob and Patrick are still the very heart that keeps this decades old franchise beating, this time within a journey of conquering their fears that simultaneously brings them closer together while uniquely challenging their unity more urgently than ever. Despite the actions of the execution feeling like they’re continuously taking away from the entertaining appeal of the film, it’s the infectiously proven chemistry that Kenny and Fagerbakke lend to these characters that gives the material meaning in its most trying of times, allowing each of them not only the naturally effortless opportunity to step seamlessly back into these career-defining roles once more, but also a much-appreciative element of heart to the stakes and circumstances of their mission, which feels refreshingly welcome when so much of the comedy simply isn’t working. Kenny and Fagerbakke are great, but it might just be Mark Hamill and Regina Hall who downright steal the show, each with vocalized contorting and grungy deliveries that allow each of them to disappear seamlessly into their respective roles, without becoming a glaring distraction to the integrity of their characters. This is certainly nothing new for Hamill, who takes over the role of the The Flying Dutchman from Bryan Doyle Murray, who has carved a secondary career out of being one of the most prominent vocal actors of our time, but for Hall it’s truly a chance to openly embrace a character so void of anything previously that she has championed with continued success, and in terms of character acting, might just very well cement the best work of her entire career to date, as strange as that sounds in a movie like this. Lastly, the film does maintain a consistently urgent pacing throughout its 90-minute runtime, despite so much of the exploration feeling derivatively stale, and much credit goes to Drymon for keeping so many of these long-winded sequences continuously running, even as they serve for the primary ingredients towards the foundation of the movie’s plot. As to where most family films are condemned with such an ineffective brand of humorous material, Drymon’s experienced grip lends itself effortlessly to pushing these individualized scenes as far as they ideally should, with the age of the audience firmly in mind, and it keeps so many of the film’s biggest moments free from sagging the integrity of the engagement to tediously taxing waters, making for a free-flowing narrative that never convolutes on the intention of its message, nor the magnitude of the story that it’s attempting to tell.

NEGATIVES

While “Search for SquarePants” is more of the same reaffirming comfort food for its limitless fandom, it also means that it still alienates audiences like me, who have never found a comfortable consistency into this cherished property, beginning with a derivatively bland and heavily predictable screenplay that fails to surmise even an accidental surprise to any of my preconceived expectations. Part of the problem with the script is certainly that I feel like I’ve seen this kind of plot and conflict play out, with some minor deviations, on a variety of sitcoms, throughout my life, and while this simplicity might work for a childlike audience who are there simply to indulge in the characters who they’ve grew up idolizing, for adult audiences, it doesn’t engage us in ways that feel entertaining or even remotely original, and I found so much of the material feeling like reheated leftovers of gags from the previous three films, leading to a concerning lack of laughter that fails the film on its most basic objective towards its audience. In that regard, the material doesn’t just crash, but it also burns in these overwhelming gaps of audience silence that hung overhead in my auditorium so apparently, featuring the same brand of redundant toilet humor, juvenile sarcasm and absence of cleverness that even momentarily subverted how I expected so many of these individualized set-ups to pay-off. For some, that might sound like compelling ingredients to what they’ve always sought out of another delve under the sea into the world of SpongeBob SquarePants, but for my money it just further reaffirmed how the well of optimism has long since run dry in a franchise that has exploited every unique seaside pun and abrasively jarring delivery from its decorated ensemble, and considering I got twice as many laughs from a five minute Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles short film on the adverse effects of Artificial Intelligence, that played before the movie, it proves that I’m not too old to laugh at this brand of material, just too experienced to fall for the same soulless shill that this franchise has been selling me for decades. If this isn’t enough, the film feels jarringly plagued by too many characters involved in such an unappealing script to any of the actors’ efforts, with some notable characters of the movie’s longtime history deduced to glorified cameos, leaving inevitable disappointment to fans seeking an opportunity to indulge in them. The thanklessly oppressed pertain to Sandy Cheeks and Plankton, two characters who have made such a lasting impression to the series’ duration, yet here are limited by one-off scenes of limited dialogue, and considering the movie goes out of its way to balance respective arcs between SpongeBob and Patrick’s journey with The Flying Dutchman, and another centering around Mr. Krabs, Squidward, and Gary determined to save them, it left the two omittances feeling so inconsequential to the movie’s integrity, despite generating their own respective fandom to the franchise’s benefit. Aside from a faulty and ultimately unfulfilling screenplay, the film also features one of the worst soundtrack choices that I’ve heard in recent memory, with Ice Spice’s “Big Guy” feeling like a method of torture utilized to get me to admit something sinister that I’m responsible for. Between hearing this song twice in the five minute vignette that counted down to the movie, as well as two more times during the film itself, it grated on my nerves in the most unforgiving way, making me feel like the crotchety kind of old men who scoff openly about the contemporary rap scene, with my eyes twitching uncontrollably, each time I heard those opening notes weave back into the traumatically terrified confines of my mind. Instrumentally, the song is harmlessly forgettable, with a ten second beat that frequently repeats over two-and-a-half mind-numbingly nauseating minutes, but lyrically this song is proof of Satan’s existence, with the repeated chorus of “SpongeBob, Big guy, pants OK” there to remind parents of the agonizing exercise of family bonding that haunts so many family movies, and in a cinematic year currently pertaining to 221 movies that I’ve seen, it is not only the single worst song that I’ve heard in any movie, but also a reminder that I’m destined to die a slow and agonizing death.

OVERALL
“The SpongeBob Movie: Search For SquarePants” is the same reheated kind of leftovers for this dwindling franchise, in that it has clearly lost the freshness of its appealing taste, despite going down smoothly for so much of its passionately nostalgic-nourishing fandom. Despite some stunning animated techniques of three-dimensionally colorful and captivating canvases, as well as meaningful work from a talentedly stacked ensemble, the fourth film in the SpongeBob cinematic universe sinks under the weight of its own derivativity, lack of originality, and projective ambition to the outline of the material, feeling like the obligatory recap episode in a franchise that has clearly run too long.

My Grade: 5.4 or D