MAGE’s review published on Letterboxd:
The kids wanted something more breezy and brief than No Way Home for the second half of our Saturday double featch, and this silly little time waster did the trick just fine. It’s not a patch on the legitimately brilliant first SpongeBob movie, but really, what is? There’s still some inspired lunacy scattered throughout Sponge out of Water, though. Much of it generating from an extremely game Antonio Banderas performance as the pirate, Burger Beard. Dude is going for broke in an extremely un-self-conscious capacity that was playing like gangbusters with my kids. The estimable Matt Berry also turns in some goofily arch voiceover work.
I’ll always love SpongeBob, as it was the first “modern” kiddie cartoon I got into with my eldest boy, back when he was a toddler in the early aughts. And I still can enjoy it with my youngsters today. It was also fun for me to point out to my kids all the many, many movie references plopped in this to appeal to grown-ups. A delightful, memory-creating evening in the home theater for me and the little ones.