Reel Entropy

I’m really not sure how to feel about the bait and switch here. Many of the lines in the trailer aren’t in the movie at all and it outright lies about Burger Beard’s plot. Slash’s scenes were all cut from the final product. But at the same time, the movie follows through on all its basic promises. Photos courtesy Paramount Pictures.

Well, if you wanted a feature-length episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, here you go.

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water’s advertising — and title, for that matter — hinged mostly on the scenes where SpongeBob SquarePants (Tom Kenny) and crew are on the beach in CGI, and that’s a little deceptive as they spend only a long denouement on dry land, about 25 minutes out of 93.

The real plot of the movie is divided into rough thirds. The pirate from the series’ opening theme is re-cast as Captain Burger Beard (Antonio Banderas), a greedy swashbuckler with an amphibious food truck and reality-warping powers which he uses to steal the secret recipe to Mr. Krabs’ (Clancy Brown) krabby patties, famously addictive in Bikini Bottom. Upon the recipe’s seemingly magical disappearance, the town is thrown into Mad Max-style dystopian chaos, with the acolytes pursuing the last two creatures to lay hands on the recipe — SquarePants and Plankton (Mr. Lawrence). The duo escape through time, and their time-traveling shenanigans make up the main body of the movie. After that segment is over, the whole town embarks on a long journey to confront Burger Beard.

It feels slimy to not call this movie out for reneging on so many of its specific promises, but Sponge Out of Water shows folks what they came to see. While most of the series isn’t coherent enough to draw a full movie from, this film’s journey is a good length, well-paced and always entertaining. The potty humor is still present — the toilet paper sticks to the extra-dimensional dolphin’s fin just a touch too long — but most of the movie is sideways enough that it avoids descending into predictability.

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So, it’s called American Sniper, but he spends most of the movie leading door-to-door teams. Photos courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

Remember The Hurt Locker? Well, American Sniper is basically that with a sniper instead of a bomb disposal expert.

The movie tells the ostensibly mostly true story of Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper, who also produces), a SEAL sniper who accumulated 160 confirmed out of 255 probable kills over four tours in Iraq. He garnered widespread fame among both the military and the insurgency, called “The Legend” by one side and “The Devil of Ramadi” by the other, which eventually put an $80,000 price on his head. Kyle also participates in door-to-door searches and leads teams hunting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Mustafa (Sammy Sheik), an Olympian insurgent sniper.

American Sniper’s most obvious characteristic as a film is how similar it is to The Hurt Locker. In terms of setting and aesthetics and in terms of visceral appeal, they are the same movie — Sniper is significantly faster, but they’re both about watching high-tension situations against guerrilla warriors in Iraq. Locker is the better of the two because William James is a more interesting character and, though it doesn’t claim to be a true story, it’s based on an embedded journalist’s experiences and probably about as accurate as Sniper, based on Kyle’s autobiography — Kyle had a nasty streak of unverifiable claims, and some of his more famous confirmed exploits are heavily altered in the movie. But that doesn’t mean Sniper isn’t an intense, overwhelming experience in its own right.

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