Review: Fans will relish 'The Bob's Burgers Movie,' which delivers the same fast-talking humor as the TV show

Fans of the animated family comedy “Bob’s Burgers” will surely get a kick out of the expanded version, “The Bob’s Burgers Movie” — and comparative newbies, like me, should become converts to the rapid-fire vocal rhythms and inventive gags that creator Loren Bouchard and company have constructed here.

The Belcher family lives in an apartment upstairs from the burger restaurant in a seaside vacation community, not too far from the town pier and amusement park. Bob (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin) is the hangdog patriarch, married to the perpetually optimistic Linda (voiced by John Roberts). They have three kids: The reasonable oldest daughter, Tina (voiced by Dan Mintz); the chipper son, Gene (voiced by Eugene Mirman), and the youngest, the sometimes aggressive Louise (voiced by Kristen Schaal). Yes, you observed correctly that in a family with three women or girls, only one of them is voiced by a human female.

As the movie starts, the Belchers are facing a financial crisis, after the bank refuses to extend the loan on the restaurant, leaving Bob and Linda a week to earn enough money to pay off the loan. This is made more difficult when a giant sinkhole opens up in front of the restaurant, blocking the door from customers. While Bob and Linda try to persevere, their main hope is to talk their doddering landlord, Calvin Fischoeder (voiced by Kevin Kline), into letting them delay their rent payment.

Mr. Fischoeder has problems of his own, when Louise — in an effort to prove she’s not a scared little girl, despite her insistence to continue to wear her rabbit-ear knit cap — climbs into the sinkhole, where she finds a rotting corpse. That body turns out to be a carny who’s been missing from the amusement park for six years, and Fischoeder is the suspect in the man’s murder.

Louise cajoles Tina and Gene to look into the killing, and try to prove Mr. Fischoeder’s innocence. The effort leads them to encounter Mr. Fischoeder’s eccentric brother, Felix (voiced by Zach Galifianakis), and their detail-oriented cousin Grover (voiced by David Wain). The kids also find some secrets underneath the amusement park’s pier.

Bouchard, co-directing with Bernard Derriman and working off a script from series writer Nora Smith, doesn’t do much to reinvent the wheel. The animation expands from time to time to fit its larger screen, but mostly it stays in the confines established by the TV version. The visual humor is mostly concerned with pun-filled names for the businesses on the burger joint’s street.

The reliable wellspring of humor in “The Bob’s Burgers Movie” is the quick-witted banter among the Belchers, particularly when the kids get going. Schaal, Mirman and Mintz are as well practiced as any comedy team — and their overlapping dialogue overflows with wry humor. When these three really get going, the audience will laugh their buns off.

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‘The Bob’s Burgers Movie’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 27, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for rude/suggestive material and language. Running time: 102 minutes.