A questionable spin-off of a legendary franchise that’s lost its magic washes out Denis Villeneuve on streaming

SpongeBob SquarePants is well and truly in a league of its own in the world of cartoons. For over 25 years, SpongeBob and his motley crew of nautical pals have been the highlight of many a generation’s after-school routine, but at this stage, it’s safe to say that the show has reached a point where the audience would be better served by reruns rather than its current, tiresome trajectory.

The latest product out of said trajectory is Plankton: The Movie, an uncannily animated spin-off film starring Plankton, for some reason. As has been the case for a while now, it’s a far cry from the SpongeBob of yore that so effortlessly rendered cynicism temporarily extinct, but there’s apparently enough brand loyalists out there to keep even the most paltry SpongeBob era floating.

Per FlixPatrol, Plankton: The Movie has hatched a rather successful evil plan to snag second place on the United States’ Netflix film charts at the time of writing, falling short of first place on account of its vibe twin Despicable Me 4, but faring much better than an eighth-place Sicario — one of the many pillars of Denis Villeneuve’s mighty filmography, but evidently futile in the face of soulless SpongeBob spin-offs.

Plankton: The Movie is a movie about Plankton, or at least whatever iteration of Plankton (and Bikini Bottom at large) is being coughed up here. When his plot to steal Mr. Krabs’ secret Krabby Patty formula fails yet again, his computer wife, Karen, — who feels unheard in this marriage — decides enough and enough and goes solo for a world domination plan of her own. Wary of the damage a computer can cause by girlbossing too hard, Plankton teams up with SpongeBob to save the world and, if he has time, this civil union between amoeba and monitor.

The failure of Plankton: The Movie, like most every SpongeBob movie released after 2015, lies in its simple disregard for why SpongeBob worked for as long and as consistently as it did. Key to adapting any episodic television series is understanding character dynamics and behavior and how they would gel with the situational subject matter of whatever plot they find themselves in. So why are Sandy, Mrs. Puff, and Pearl — three characters that have hardly ever had anything to do with each other — being played as a trio of gal pals who lunch with Karen, who’s apparently also a bestie of theirs?

It’s because these movies don’t actually care about SpongeBob; they care about what the IP is worth on a market level. That’s why these beloved characters are treated as incidental hand puppets for unimaginative nonsense instead of the characters that partially defined the quality of the cartoon.

Moreover, the SpongeBob adventures of yore never felt the need to explain themselves. Many of the jokes — from subtle one-liners to surreal set pieces — never actually played themselves as jokes but as routine occurrences in the lives of these characters; they’re played straight because this is straight for SpongeBob and the gang. Plankton: The Movie, by contrast, directly acknowledges that it’s a movie in desperate need to entertain and exaggerates many of its gags, none of them with the mature-yet-accessible wit that defined the other half of this show’s incandescent identity.

Also, this movie has the audacity to throw in a series of forgettable musical numbers while poking a bit of fun at the original 2004 film, as if the raw power of “Goofy Goober Rock” alone doesn’t blow the whole of Plankton: The Movie out of the water.