REVIEW: ‘Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie’ Is A Complete Sinker

Netflix produces a fair number of excellent original animated projects. Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie is not one of them. This cheap attempt at capitalizing on nostalgia has no soul with its wretched animation style, very poor script, and hardly a thing nostalgic about it. The movie opens with a confounding musical number, launches straight into the over-encumbered plot, and keeps its main characters, Sandy Cheeks (Carolyn Lawrence) and Spongebob Squarepants (Tom Kenney), away from the rest of the cast just about the whole time.

The Sandy Cheeks Movie is so uncanny in just about every way. The first and most obvious is the animation style. Changing the animation style of a long-running series is jarring and bizarre in the first place. But it’s made so much worse by the fact that it looks exceptionally cheap. Everything is so lifeless. It feels like watching the reanimated corpse of a beloved TV show puppeteered around by corporations who see necromancy as a cash cow rather than the abomination against nature they’ve created.

The only nice thing to be said about the animation is that it works okay in the excessive number of live-action sequences. Perhaps half the film takes place in live-action, and maybe the animation was designed with this in mind. It actually almost looks natural. But the physical comedy that Spongebob is so well known for looks so flat in this 3D style. And worse yet, with the number of times that real actors are put into CGI situations, its nearly unbearable.

To be slightly fair to The Sandy Cheeks Movies, perhaps the children this movie is ostensibly designed for won’t notice or care about what the movie looks like. What’s even harder to avoid, though, is the wretched attempt at comedy. This movie is not funny in the least bit. Do a few jokes land? Sure. But with the physical comedy already on the fritz, the dialogue just sinks the affair even further.

The Sandy Cheeks movie has this weird positioning where it simultaneously acts like everyone who’s watching should know exactly who Sandy and the whole of Bikini Bottom are, yet it heaves mountains of meaningless exposition on the audience scene after scene. It never explains anything about the characters or their relationships with one another. It’s just constantly explaining the plot to you as it’s happening.

Children are not stupid. They do not need the scene they are watching explained to them as it’s happening. Especially not kids old enough to be watching Spongebob and its unsavory jokes about Squidward’s wishes for death. If the movie spared all of its annoying expository dialogue and replaced it with actual jokes, maybe the movie would have faired a little bit better.

Especially considering how convoluted the plot is. A giant crane scoops up Bikini Bottom and takes it out of the ocean. Simple. But as we learn about why and how and the attempt to weave some lore for Sandy, it gets too complicated. The movie sets itself up to be a road trip buddy comedy, but there’s only one set piece on the trip because there’s so much exposition going on it’s wasting all the screen time. In the live-action world, a bunch of scientists are up to shenanigans and their acting is as bad as in any Nickelodeon live-action project. The roles are as lifeless as the animation with fewer funny jokes than any other point in the movie.

Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie is an absolute low point for the long-running series. In its attempt to spin a character off into her own movie, it loses all the charm that makes Spongebob’s ensemble so iconic. Four “my leg” jokes does not a good Spongebob make. And none of the new characters in the form of Sandy’s family offer a lick of personality. It’s a shame because there are plenty of decent elements at play here. But ultimately, Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie is a total bust.

Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie is streaming now, exclusively on Netflix.