Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie

Occasionally stirs itself up into enjoyably campy comedy (see the tornado chase, SpongeBob orchestra, wacky head-transplanting flashbacks and climax) but is mostly stiff and bland (not helped by CG animation and live actors that are equally cold and lifeless). The songs are bad, the secondary characters are there but have nothing to do, and the attempt at an arc for Sandy is embarrassingly feeble (her final song about embracing her two families resolves a tension that was never really there).

This was a big hit with the younger ones, but the dilemma for me was that Sandy Cheeks is my least favorite character of Bikini Bottom and here she gets most of the attention. Still I got to see SpongeBob crash in a cactus, which brought a unusually loud laugh out of me.

I'm baffled by how awful this was, genuinely incompetent in every way.