So, it seems that the Ol' Sponge still has some life left in him after all.
"The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water" hit theaters last Friday and made a very respectable $56 million at the box office, finally dethroning "American Sniper" which had a four-week run at the top spot.
It's been more than a decade since "The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie" made $140 million worldwide in 2004.
"The delay in films did not matter at all. It's become a generational experience. It's just a great brand," Paul Dergarabedian, an analyst for Rentrak, told Entertainment Weekly. "It's incredibly impressive. This is so beyond what everyone thought. It's nearing 'Lego Movie' territory."
It is hard to believe that Nickelodeon has been airing "SpongeBob" episodes since 1999...but it has. And I'd be willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that a good portion of the weekend's audience were 20-somethings who grew up with the deliriously silly sea creature and his undersea pals.
For me, the generational influence of Mr. SquarePants is more plainly evident. My son Kyle, who is now 22, loved the show when it first aired and watched it incessantly. I took him to see the first film before my youngest daughter, Bridget, was even born. I took Bridget, who just turned 10, to see this new film over the weekend, while Kyle now lives and works independently in Baltimore.
Kind of mind blowing when you stop to think about it, but that just goes to show you just how long SpongeBob has been ingrained in our collective pop culture experience. Who would have thought that back in 1999?
In terms of the film itself, it's good...but not anywhere near as good as the 2004 film. There are certainly some laugh-out-loud moments in "Sponge Out of Water," but not anywhere near as were in the "The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie." There was also a better use of music and songs (both original and licensed) in the first movie, and I found that sorely lacking in this film.
A spirited, live-action Antonio Banderas starts off the sequel as the pirate Burger Beard, who follows his treasure map to obtain a legendary book. (In a joke that will probably whiz right over most kid's heads, there's an old-school library checkout card on the inside front cover of the book, showing Captain Kidd and Bluebeard as its earlier readers.) That book contains the story of SpongeBob SquarePants (voiced by Tom Kenny) and fills non-viewers of the TV show in on the basic storyline and cast of characters.
The resentful Plankton (Mr. Lawrence) launches a plethora of assaults on the Krusty Krab, the restaurant where SpongeBob works cooking up Krabby Patties, the beloved snack of everyone in the undersea town of Bikini Bottom. Penny-pinching Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown) steadfastly guards the secret recipe, but it somehow vanishes as SpongeBob foils one of Plankton's attempts to steal it.
Without Krabby Patties, apparently the glue that holds Bikini Bottom's society together, the town descends into an apocalyptic tumult, and it's up to former enemies SpongeBob and Plankton to team up to find the formula and save their friends, via a slapdash time machine that's mainly Plankton's "computer wife," Karen.
As the trailers promise, SpongeBob, Plankton, Mr. Krabs, the dour Squidward (Rodger Bumpass), idiot starfish Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke) and squirrel Sandy Cheeks (Carolyn Lawrence) wind up crossing over into the surface world to battle Burger Beard head-on as superheroic versions of themselves, but this clash doesn't take place until well into the third act. This is no doubt welcome news to those who worried the movie's hybrid of live action and animation was merely a gimmick; that part is handled very well and looks fantastic overall...especially Sandy who is depicted as a human sized/"real" squirrel on the surface without her normal underwater, diving suit attire. That interpretation definitely made me laugh out loud.
At the end of the day, "The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water" is fine family entertainment and a breezy, fun way to spend 90 minutes of your life. It's not as good as the original, which in my mind is pretty darn close to be being one of the "classic" animated films, but how many sequels are, when you really stop to think about it?
You can take the words of a jaded, 43-year-old man here, or you can listen to my 10-year-old daughter, the real target audience for this flick, who summed up her feelings on the film thusly: "It was really good! I'd see it again tomorrow!"
