Mike McCahill

The results prove middling at best, not on any level dealing the knockout blow that religious conversion practice deserves; nor is it ever the campy scream the set-up might have licensed.

Co-writer and director Shea Wageman earns some points for weirdness.

It is efficiently executed, though its relentless cursor-nudging will probably make older viewers want to unplug and retreat into an 18th-century novel.

The cast nurdle matters along to the climactic real ale awards, which becomes the scene of current cinema’s least surprising surprise result.

It is perhaps too much the acquired taste (and smell) to appeal to everyone, but it’s distinctive, never dull and – much like its most noxious niffs – difficult to shake.

British director Hardy has far more fun here than he did with 2018’s mechanical franchise entry The Nun.

This final chapter, like its immediate predecessors, falls somewhere between footnote and outright detritus, like a plastic bag being blown through the multiplex by a stiff breeze.

Many of us have long sensed culture is making a decisive break with the analogue in favour of the (perhaps terminally) online and Fischbach’s film makes that paradigm shift not just visible but visceral; it feels not unlike spending 12 hours on Twitch with all the curtains closed.

Whether its spitballing silliness will linger when the lights come up is debatable, but it’s a solid SpongeBob movie.

The good news is that it remains terrific: punchy, old-school stunt work, crisply uncluttered cutting, and varied, inventive baddie-splattering from the moment Aatami deploys one of those beams to take down a jet fighter.