‘The SpongeBob Movie: Search For SquarePants’ Review: It’s SpongeBob on a Pirate Adventure, but With Most of the Joy Squeezed Out

It might be an exaggeration to say that “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants” is the movie that finally squeegees the life out of SpongeBob SquarePants. But watching this friendly yet rather toothless adventure, with its jokes that simply don’t pop the way they used to, you can feel SpongeBob sliding into the zone of a harebrained yet rote elder statesman of high-energy juvenilia. He’s still a beguiling doofus who, as voiced by Tom Kenny, sounds like Daffy Duck on laughing gas, and there’s still an appealing aura of arrested kitsch to the now shiny and digital “SpongeBob” world. But the original “SpongeBob” series, and several of the previous big-screen adaptations, struck much funnier notes of flippant irresponsibility.

Back in 2011, when the original Nickelodeon TV series “SpongeBob SquarePants” got called on the carpet by a study in Pediatrics magazine, which found that the show was damaging the attention span of 4-year-olds,…