Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie opens with an outrageous problem: an entire town lifted out of the sea like a snack pulled from a lunchbox. Liza Johnson directs this Netflix adventure comedy, spun off from Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants. It sends Sandy Cheeks (voiced by Carolyn Lawrence) and SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) to Texas, Sandy’s home state, to get Bikini Bottom back. The film mixes CGI animation with live action. Sometimes that works. More often it just looks odd.

The setup is simple. The B.O.O.T.S. laboratory (Bureau Of Official Texas Science) has scooped up the town, and the two friends climb to the surface to return it. A tornado blows them off course, Sandy’s family, who work as a traveling circus act, joins the rescue, and the plot keeps collecting detours. Randy Cheeks (Johnny Knoxville) uses the family van to smuggle nuts, which earns everyone a police chase. Later, SpongeBob and Sandy are fired out of a cannon toward B.O.O.T.S. None of this is subtle, and the film is at its best when it stops pretending to be tidy. The chase is loose and quick, and at 86 minutes nothing has time to sour. The Guardian’s critic called the whole thing manically enjoyable, particularly for its core audience, and passed on his seven-year-old niece’s verdict of four stars. That is a fair description of the good stretches.

The trouble starts where the two worlds meet. The scenes that put humans next to cartoon characters feel unpolished, and the digital Bikini Bottom has less of the handmade oddness of the series. SpongeBob and his friends sometimes look more like plastic toys than like the characters we know. That is partly a matter of taste, but I could not shake it.

Sandy’s family gets short shrift. Knoxville and Craig Robinson, who voices Pa Cheeks, only lend their voices to the circus relatives, and both keep the volume high without giving the parts much shape. Knoxville is the livelier of the two, and Randy is the newcomer I would happily see again. Ilia Isorelýs Paulino plays Phoebe, one of Sandy’s colleagues at the laboratory, but the script leaves her almost no room to grow.

The villain fares worse. Sue Nahmee, the new head of B.O.O.T.S., plans to genetically modify the people of Bikini Bottom so they can breathe air, then clone them and sell them as toy pets. Mr. Krabs, Squidward and Patrick serve as her test subjects. Later we learn she is a cyborg masquerading as a human. The twist is meant to shock. In practice it arrives with no preparation, and her motives are dispatched too quickly to matter. The middle of the film sags for the same reason: the story has a lot of ideas and little patience for any of them.

The voice work is the steadiest part. Kenny still finds the warmth in SpongeBob, and Clancy Brown, Bill Fagerbakke and Rodger Bumpass return as Mr. Krabs, Patrick and Squidward as if no time had passed. Lawrence gives Sandy her usual drive, though the script keeps pulling her away from what makes her interesting, which is her stubbornness as a scientist. The score by Moniker keeps things moving without asking for attention.

Critics split. Some enjoyed the energy, others found it incoherent, and one reviewer dismissed it as an undiscerning kids’ film. It reached Netflix on August 2, 2024, after a copy leaked online on January 21 of that year, and it drew 12.8 million views over its first weekend. It is the first in a run of SpongeBob character spin-offs for the service, and Plankton: The Movie followed in 2025. A child who loves the series will probably be content. The adult on the sofa next to them will get jokes at a brisk pace and have forgotten most of them by the time the credits roll.