Don’t call this tale of the misadventures of a high-pitched sponge and his random pals living in the undersea village of Bikini Bottom 'kids’ stuff'. Nickelodeon’s animated TV sensation has always been a home for surreal stoner humour, utterly inappropriate sexual innuendos and a constant stream of one-liners. The series’s first big-screen foray, 2004’s ‘The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie’, had children and adults helplessly collapsing in a unified mass of giggles. This belated sequel is, in some ways, even better – ever so slightly more unhinged.
Tensions rise on the ocean floor as SpongeBob (voiced by the eternally young Tom Kenny) and his pink-skinned starfish BFF Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke) brace themselves for an attack on their beloved Krusty Krab patty joint from competing restaurateur, Plankton. Condiments are unleashed in defence – ‘with relish!’ spits our absorbent hero – but there’s a no-win outcome as their secret recipe somehow disappears, plunging the town into a ‘Mad Max’-style postapocalyptic nightmare of rampaging mobs and leather outfits. (Multiple movie references to Sergio Leone and Stanley Kubrick are strictly for the grown-ups.)
Salvation requires a trip to a busy beach (and a slightly shoddy conversion to live-action), not quite as euphorically giddy as the universe we’ve just left. Whenever ‘Sponge Out of Water’ indulges Antonio Banderas as a pirate with a fast-food fetish, it lags. But there’s more than enough cracked zaniness to qualify the movie as triumph of anarchy. When you meet the refined dolphin who shoots lasers out of his head and monitors the solar system for disturbances, you’ll either be in the swim of things or a stick-in-the-mud.