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Saving Bikini Bottom Movie Review

Saving Bikini Bottom is a 2024 family animated film directed by Liza Johnson. It is easily the worst SpongeBob movie released so far.

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“Hey everyone! They’re selling phase ones and they’re free!“

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When Bikini Bottom is scooped out of the ocean, Sandy and SpongeBob head to Sandy’s home state of Texas and enlist her family to help save Patrick, Squidward, Mr. Krabs and the rest of the gang. This is the first film in the series of character-centric spin-offs that Netflix is planning to make and it’s such a horrible start. It’s such a poorly made movie that will only appeal to the die-hard fans of the franchise.

The cardinal mistake that the filmmakers made here is the decision to move the plot above the ocean floor. This led to the film not really being animated, but a hybrid of live-action and animation. I have no qualms with this mixed medium when it’s done right, but this is one of the worst examples of such a practice as they mixed them horribly, resulting in an ugly-looking film that was a sore to the eyes.

The worst offender is Wanda Sykes herself. She is a villain of sorts and eventually she becomes fish – or I should say half-human, half-fish. How she looked was absolutely atrocious and I felt really sorry for the actress as she deserved better. How they treated her was horrendous, but the other characters did not fare much better either.

All of the new characters were thoroughly disposable and Squidward, Krabs and Patrick were in very short supply, which deeply bothered me. SpongeBob is his reliably manic self while Sandy is likable as always, but having in mind that this was supposed to be her movie, we did not learn anything new or interesting about her. She almost became a side character in her own story.

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Saving Bikini Bottom looks terrible, it has a weak score and its humor is in short supply – I did not laugh once. The adventurous elements are there, but I did not care as I did not love the setting. The water park sequence was a lot of fun and it was very well executed, but nothing else worked. The energy is there, but the pace was frenetic to the extreme, leading to poor characterization and terrible writing.