Boxing Day movies: Sydney Sweeney’s silly thriller, Brendan Fraser returns, Anaconda reboot and more

Whatever age he’s meant to be, we can assume this hasn’t changed much, if at all, over the quarter-century his show has aired on the Nickelodeon network in the US. So it’s surprising to learn at the start of his new movie The Search For Squarepants that he’s recently been getting taller, and harbours hopes of becoming a bona fide “big guy” – having forgotten this already occurred after a fashion in the 2015 Sponge Out Of Water, where he and his friends briefly morphed into musclebound superhero versions of themselves in 3D.

For the purpose of this particular story, Spongebob’s dream is to be a swashbuckling pirate, though he remains typically vague about what exactly pirates do. Thus, he and his starfish buddy Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke) are lured into the clutches of a vengeful ghost known as the Flying Dutchman (Mark Hamill), trapped for centuries by a curse and on the lookout for anyone fool enough to take his place.

In the meantime, Spongebob’s penny-pinching boss Mr Krabs (Clancy Brown) and a couple of sidekicks embark on the rescue mission of the title, which leads them to the Dutchman’s domain, an underworld located beneath the regular undersea realm and accessible via Davy Jones’s Locker (which is, of course, a literal locker, belonging to a kid named Davy at Bikini Bottom high school).

It sounds convoluted. But the real problem is that it’s not convoluted enough, especially compared to the glory days of Sponge Out Of Water, where the plot involved time travel and an extra-terrestrial dolphin possibly inspired by The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

The director Derek Drymon and his writers do what they can to conjure up a semblance of the old anything-can-happen spirit, throwing in fourth-wall-breaks, shoutouts to The Odyssey, and a partly live-action climax set aboard a rollercoaster that extends into outer space. But the bursts of invention are nowhere near frequent enough to mask the oldest formula in family entertainment, where the over-reaching hero learns that he’s better off just being himself.

It’s true that no-one wants SpongeBob to change permanently, even if he were capable of doing so. But after several movies, sixteen seasons of the TV show, and numerous adventures in other media, Nickelodeon may have squeezed everything they can out of the character. At any rate, The Search For Squarepants feels like growing stale rather than growing up.

The story will mirror their own circumstances. Griff and Claire’s characters will also be making an Anaconda reboot – travelling down the Amazon in a boat, shooting scenes as they go. But they must first find an anaconda tame enough to become their co-star while resisting the urge to view cast and crew as its next meal.

Directed by Tom Gormican – known for The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a similarly chaotic Nicolas Cage comedy adventure – the film has one crucial element going for it. Both Rudd and Black are experts when it comes to the comedy of hysteria. They know exactly how to make you laugh while tripping over one another in a state of high anxiety, and the script gives them plenty of opportunities to do just that – especially after they hire their snake handler, Santiago (Brazilian star Selton Mello), and his supposedly biddable anaconda, Heitor. But the action does take some time to get up to speed.

The film was not shot in the Brazilian rainforest, but in Australia’s Gold Coast hinterland and other subtropical stretches of southern Queensland. The Tweed River stands in for the Amazon, and if you imagine that bit of information is going to strip away the film’s exotic attractions, don’t worry. The forest looks believably dense and dangerous, and the cast gets appropriately hot and sweaty, which is all that’s needed.

As in the original, the story’s villains are not exclusively reptilian. There’s a sub-plot centring on a gang of gold smugglers together with a mystery involving the boat’s glamorous but secretive skipper, Ana (Portuguese actress Daniela Melchior), but none of the surrounding complications boil up to anything approaching suspense. It’s the story’s gross-out appeal which revs things up to the pitch needed to make the whole thing work.

The ick factor starts kicking in after Santiago’s anaconda is chewed up by a much bigger and tougher rival. From then on, nobody is safe. I’ll spare you the details, but Gormican does take full advantage of the new anaconda’s propensity for swallowing its victims whole. It also regurgitates a select few, supplying the movie with what I will shamelessly call its biggest belly laugh.

Between panic attacks, there’s little in the way of character development, a flaw which is only to be expected, but the fact that everybody behaves according to type does create an air of predictability.

Some smarter dialogue would have helped, together with a lot more exaggeration in sending up the absurdities which account for the enduring popularity of the first film. Instead, Gormican is relying much too much on the nostalgia vote. At the risk of spoiling the party, I confess to finding the whole thing underdone.

Anaconda is in cinemas on Boxing Day.

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Counteracting the silliness is an odd sensuality. Since we can’t be sure of anyone’s real motives till the last moment, we’re encouraged to dwell on the self-evident good looks of all three leads, often in close-up, and the ambiguous charge of what passes between them.

It’s all such nonsense, Feig seems to be thinking, so why not relax and let everyone enjoy the spectacle of pretty people doing horrible things? On this level, The Housemaid delivers the goods.

But the refusal to take the thriller mechanics seriously gives the storytelling a laborious quality – and there’s a certain vestigial earnestness, as if we were meant to believe the script had something meaningful to say about class or gender relations, a proposition at least as hard to swallow as anything else.

Moreover, it doesn’t seem impossible that another director could have made something genuinely gripping out of the dynamic between Sweeney and Seyfried, who can seem like opposites but also like versions of the same person, both with large glassy eyes and the knack of using airy incredulity to mask whatever lies beneath.

So begins Phillip’s career as Rental Family’s “token white guy”, an occupation that eventually relieves his own melancholy, although there are many complications along the way.

The film’s Japanese director and co-writer, Hikari, a former actress who studied in the US, came upon Japan’s network of “rental family” companies after reading about them in a newspaper. She decided that they sprang out of a pervasive loneliness in Japanese society, a sentiment that Phillip’s colleagues heartily endorse. Consequently, they make a point of avoiding any emotional involvement in the cases they take on. Phillip, however, can’t bring himself to do the same.

His most serious challenge is Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman), a bright 10-year-old whose mother, Hitomi, hires him to play Mia’s estranged father, who walked out on them when the girl was a baby. Hitomi reasons that the presence of a father will help her get Mia into the private school she’s chosen. It’s a tough assignment which can only end in tears as Phillip soon realises. He can also see that some of those tears will be his own.

It’s a sweet film with a touching ending and Fraser, with his wide-eyed looks and well-meaning air, is perfect casting but Hikari’s direction is a little too leisurely. It strips out the tension and the film doesn’t work quite as well as it deserves to.

Through it all, we return to Orwell’s measured words and scenes of the remote Hebridean island of Jura, where he would retire to write in between treatments for the tuberculosis that would kill him. All his novels, he said, had a common starting point: “A feeling of partisanship and a sense of injustice.” If Peck’s scattergun scrapbook of our age and its despotic windbags – Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump – and often vilified dissidents, such as Edward Snowden, encourages further reading among viewers of Orwell’s steely prose, so much the better. As he wrote in the last diary entry he managed before his lungs gave out: “All that matters has already been written.”