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. (For reasons I can’t quite analyze, it was better when
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