Saving Bikini Bottom Review: The Iconic Yellow Sponge's New Cinematic Low
Copyright © Apple Studios, These Pictures, Columbia Pictures
Title: Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie
Director: Liza Johnson
Based on: Characters by Stephen Hillenburg
Release Date: August 2, 2024
Since the SpongeBob SquarePants franchise is currently active for twenty-five years, a new movie for the sponge just released this year. Its movie series already consists of three movies which are part of the main lineup. Starting with this movie, Nickelodeon will make spin-off films that will be released for streaming. Today's review will talk about Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie, the latest SpongeBob movie, as it takes its achievement of being the first movie of the franchise to be a character spinoff. Entirely what it says on the tin, this movie is shining the spotlight on Sandy Cheeks as she goes on a high-stakes quest with SpongeBob himself. The reception consisted of mixed reviews from both critics and audiences alike. On Rotten Tomatoes, it got a Tomatometer of 57%, plus an Audience score of 31%. On IMDb, the score is 4.1/10. However, the Metacritic scores are not listed yet since this was just released. Even with gorgeous animation that hits the notes, Saving Bikini Bottom is nothing more than vermin that serves as filler for the SpongeBob movie lineup.
Summary
After Bikini Bottom gets scooped by an evil CEO, Sandy Cheeks (Carolyn Lawrence) and SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) team up to save their friends, family, and the rest of the gang. To get there, the duo go to Sandy's home, Texas, where her family still resides in. All of them unite to save all of Bikini Bottom from the heinous experiments the CEO will perform on the gang.
Reasons
Even if this is a movie of the iconic sponge, the worst suds to come out from Saving Bikini Bottom are the purposeless story, banal characters, and pretty horrible live-action acting. Well, Sponge on the Run is enough to be filler but this one screams filler even more. Spinoff movies, like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, are fine if the story is good and has meaning to the character. For this one's case, this is not a good spinoff because of how very little it has to do with Sandy's character development. If this movie is taken out of the franchise canon, everything else would stay the same because Sandy's spinoff story is so uninspired and random. Mainly, there is the saving the townspeople plot mixed in with the lost family subplot and other tropes, plus plot twists, seen in other animated movies before, much to the point where it gets annoying. Next, the characters are just reduced from being entertaining to being one-dimensional and annoying. Sandy Cheeks is changed to being a plain action heroine who just has her traits for the sake of it. Alongside, SpongeBob is now a comic relief that barely does anything in the story to help. What is worse is that when it puts him to a side character, his other abilities are just deemed as useless to the adventure. Sandy's family members are only here as much more filler because the story writers cannot think of anything original. They just wanted to wow the audience in the most uninspired way possible. The main antagonist, Sue Nahmee, is a hilariously awful villain who is just fitting into the greedy CEO trope for the sake of being a so-called "intimidating" villain. All of the other characters? The old are also reduced to being annoying, while the new ones are absolutely useless. Finally, before moving on to the next paragraph, the live-action acting is not even that great. Sure, their costumes do look pretty good but the acting is another story. They are trying to act silly just for the sake of it, as well as act dramatic for the sake of it, which makes the live-action characters so stupid for the kids to even enjoy. Sure, Wanda Sykes did a great performance but her character just comes off as stupid.
The other suds that come out of Saving Bikini Bottom are the lousy humor, confusing logic and plot holes, and obviously bad editing. To start off the paragraph with, most of the movie's jokes are lowbrow, and that means the kids would only laugh instead of the adults. Sure, there is no toilet humor, but there are mostly corny jokes as well as some other gross jokes done in the movie's own way possible. A little bit of the jokes throughout the journey to Texas were pretty funny but that is just about it for the movie. Next off, the logic and plot holes are subtle but once someone goes back a little bit, there is no such sense. Well, there are more plot holes than there is confusing logic, like it makes the movie more confusing. Surprisingly, the story even has a obvious plot hole, which roots from the evil company's plan, that comes off as laughably bad. Ending off the reasons why this movie is bad, the editing is obviously lackluster as it makes the movie look more like a TV episode instead of a proper movie. Sure, this is a movie that did go to straight to streaming. However, this is not a good excuse because other Netflix original animated movies, like The Monkey King (2023) and Over the Moon, has animation that can pass as a theatrical released movie besides streaming. The editing, especially when it tries to blend in with the live-action surroundings, is a rendered mess that was rushed just for the movie to get released already. Instead of a good-looking hybrid, it looks more like an edited YouTube video done by some college student who was trying to create a CGI project.
Although the purpose of this movie is to be filler, Saving Bikini Bottom does blow some bubbles of decent animation, solid voice-acting, and even a fun soundtrack. This does have a bad story but like with other Netflix original movies of the cabinet, the animation for this movie does look solid and move smoothly. It still lives up to the CGI versions of the SpongeBob SquarePants franchise, which are the Sponge on the Run designs used from 2020, except with a glow up. It just needs some more rendering and lighting for this to be good to go. Next, thanks to this movie hiring the original voice actors of the show, the voice-acting is still as good as ever. In fact, it is way more tolerable than the live-action acting. Even if the new animated characters are not that good, they would at least get credit for their voice performances, though. There are some A-list stars like Craig Robinson and Grey DeLisle who still give off their effort. Finally, this may not be a major quality but the soundtrack is actually fun and somewhat catchy. The musical numbers may be trash but they are better when they are by themselves. This is due to how little they have to do with the story. In the end credits, there is a song that parodies the TV show's theme song by making a Sandy version, which is pretty clever.
Conclusion
Thanks to its filler story and half-baked character writing, Saving Bikini Bottom just serves to be squirrel vermin rather than support for the ocean. Compared to the recent Puss in Boots spinoff movies, the Sandy Cheeks spinoff turns out to be filler instead of proper canon. Inside this story, there also resides badly-written jokes, confusing pieces of logic, and unsewn plot holes that make the movie make no sense. To compliment, the characters are now reduced to being one-dimensional, but be thankful that they are not unlikable jerks. Unlike the solid voice-acting, the live-action acting is hilariously bad due to how they are trying so hard to be silly. Finally, the animation may be decent for 2024 standards but the rushed editing is also something that makes this movie laughable. This is what happens when you do not get Paramount involved in making a SpongeBob SquarePants movie. Fellow fans of this sponge, go stick to watching the original SpongeBob movies, or even the original cartoon, instead of this spinoff that came out of nowhere. Heck, even Paramount Pictures made an extremely way better live-action/animation hybrid with IF this year.
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