It’s funny that both of Jerry Seinfeld’s movies have been pegged to such high-concept premises, as the sitcom legend famously built his brand with a show about nothing. In fact, that might be the funniest thing about them. First came 2007’s deeply strange “Bee Movie,” in which Seinfeld — who produced, starred in, and co-wrote the project — voiced a honeybee who starts getting hot for a human florist. Now comes Seinfeld’s directorial debut, a sketchy and surreal business parody that re-imagines the rush to invent the Pop-Tart as if the rivalry between Post and Kellogg’s were as crucial to the future of western civilization as the Space Race or the Manhattan Project.
It’s the perfect streaming comedy for anyone who felt that “Oppenheimer” had too many laughs.
Why would an aging billionaire spend two years of his life — and an ungodly amount of Netflix’s money — on a star-studded comedy about delicious toaster pastries filled with dehydrated food goo? “Unfrosted” offers 1,000 different punchlines, but that’s it’s only joke.
And yet, the experience of sitting through this movie-shaped miasma of soggy breakfast puns and sad celebrity cameos all but forces you to grope in the dark for an answer to that question, no matter how rhetorically Seinfeld might ask it. I found at least two. The first and least compelling of them is COVID. Shot over the summer of 2022, “Unfrosted” didn’t begin filming until long after the worst of the pandemic was over and Hollywood had started to get back on its feet, but there’s no mistaking that its origins trace back to those stir-crazy days when Zoom helped to facilitate some of the most listless comedy that Hollywood has ever conceived (anyone who braved Judd Apatow’s “The Bubble” will recognize the signs).
Seinfeld also seems motivated by his nostalgia for the things that made his life so much fun as a kid in the early 1960s (the Slinky, whoopee cushion, and G.I. Joes in the film’s opening shot accurately tee up a story whose framing device finds Seinfeld’s character recounting the glory days of America’s breakfast industry to a runaway kid at a diner), and maybe also for a more recent time when his edgeless form of “what’s the deal with…” humor was the height of mainstream comedy. “Unfrosted” sprinkles in a few choice examples of Seinfeld’s observational schtick (“the magic of cereal is that you’re eating and drinking at the same time with one hand”), but it mostly sees him using the film’s Boomer milieu as a backdrop for an uninspired mishmash of contrived sight gags and anachronistic cultural references.
Everybody knows that you could never invent Pop-Tarts today because of woke, but telling a story that’s set in Battle Creek, Michigan circa 1964 allows Seinfeld to filter the present through the safety net of the past. It’s bad enough to watch Hugh Grant doing a pale imitation of his “Paddington 2” work as a stuck-up British thespian forced to play Tony the Tiger on TV, but just wait until he explicitly invokes the QAnon Shaman in a climactic scene in which fed-up cereal mascots storm the Kellogg’s building. It’s bad enough that Amy Schumer doesn’t have any solid jokes in her role as nepo-CEO Marjorie Post, who would go on to build Mar-a-Lago, but downright perverse that her character’s most amusing moment riffs on a Bill O’Reilly freak-out that went viral 16 years ago (“screw it, we’ll do it raw!” she screams in the face of a toaster malfunction).
Seinfeld used to say in his standup that Pop-Tarts can’t go stale because they were never fresh to begin with. As a one-liner, that was kinda funny. As the entire comedic ethos behind a 90-minute film, not so much.
Seinfeld plays fictional Kellogg’s executive Bob Cabana, an ideas man who rolls around Battle Creek like the Don Draper of mid-century Michigan. Seinfeld’s character might lack the sociopathic charm, sex pest mystique, and laser-sharp writing that made the “Mad Men” protagonist so interesting, but at least he makes up for that by looking and talking exactly like Jerry Seinfeld. And by working in an office that’s been lovingly designed to capture the same Herman Miller-esque modernity that carried Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce through the ’60s.
If not for its preoccupation with “The Right Stuff” and its half-hearted efforts to put a “Weird”-like spin on the recent wave of corporate biopics (e.g. “Blackberry,” “The Beanie Bubble”), “Unfrosted” might have worked as a dedicated spoof of AMC’s iconic drama series. The overlap becomes impossible to ignore by the end.
Anyway, Bob is the guy who writes the stuff on the cereal boxes — once a dream job for unathletic, sugar-crazed kids across this fine country. When big boss Edsel Kellogg III (Jim Gaffigan doing his best Rip Torn impression) catches wind that Marjorie Post and her minions are cooking up a revolutionary breakfast pastry at their headquarters directly across the street, it’s Bob who’s tasked with keeping pace with Kellogg’s archrival. So he assembles a crack squad of the sharpest minds in America, starting with NASA scientist Donna Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy, doing Melissa McCarthy things). Sending people to the Moon is just a ridiculous pipe dream, but creating a way for fruit ooze to survive on store shelves is a challenge worthy of Donna’s genius.
Exactly what bicycle entrepreneur Steve Schwinn (Jack McBrayer), fitness guru Jack LaLanne (a free-balling James Marsden), Nazi scientist Harold Von Braunhut (Thomas Lennon), ice cream maven Tom Carvel (legendary New York character actor Adrian Martinez), and Chef Boyardee (Bobby Moynihan) will bring to the table is even harder to define, but viewers can take solace in the fact that each of these retro Avengers will have at least eight full seconds of screen time to do it. On the other hand, the sentient ravioli that Chef Boyardee creates by injecting live seahorses into raw pasta dough emerges as something of a major character, presumably because Netflix didn’t have to pay it by the day.
Even by the standards of a slap-happy parody that feels like it should’ve been a throwaway line on “30 Rock,” “Unfrosted” doesn’t have much of a plot. The movie’s narrative shape adheres to the basic trajectory of bringing a product to market, but its script — which Seinfeld co-wrote with Spike Feresten, Barry Marder, and Andy Robin — is too hung up on the big goof of its premise to bother creating any sense of comic momentum or establishing clever instances of cause and effect.
Yes, it’s silly to pretend that the (very real) race to get Pop-Tarts on shelves was as exciting and consequential as the race to the Moon (complete with mafia-like meetings between “the five breakfast families” and frequent cut-aways to Kyle Dunnigan’s Walter Cronkite, who reports on Kellogg’s latest developments as if he’s covering the Kennedy assassination), but “Unfrosted” tries a million different ways of treating the pastry wars like a matter of life and death instead of settling on a single good one.
Inevitably, those efforts tend to contradict each other in a way that makes them all a bit less funny. Kyle Mooney, Mikey Day, and Drew Tarver as Snap, Crackle, and Pop might have worked in a self-contained “SNL” sketch, but in a movie where Tony the Tiger is a washed up British actor inside a stuffy animal costume — even though the Quaker Oats guy is just an actual guy — it’s impossible to get a read on the reality of the Rice Krispies mascots. If they’re supposed to be the cereal equivalent of the Monkees, then why do they attend a funeral in character, where they fill the grave with milk instead of dirt? Having the deceased’s confused widow ask what’s going on doesn’t feel like part of the joke so much as an admission of guilt.
Some of the random, one-scene asides are more amusing than others. Felix Solis as a Pablo Escobar-like sugar kingpin who’s obsessively preoccupied with the bad grouting job around his pool? Yes. Bill Burr as a horny JFK who’s hankering for a threesome with the Doublemint Twins? Less so. The one cameo that Netflix has prohibited critics from giving away? Not funny enough to escape a feeling of sacrilege. Gaffigan does a commendable job of anchoring the movie to a coherent reality while also playing into its atemporal silliness (“Vietnam?,” he muses while reading the newspaper, “that seems like a good idea”), but he’s underserved by the flatness of Seinfeld’s direction, and by the “weary tour guide” energy his co-star brings to a comedy whose tone and concept both demand a bit more … snap, crackle, and pop.
All told, “Unfrosted” is the cinematic equivalent of a kid mixing every cereal from his parents’ cupboard into a giant salad bowl with the hope that a splash of milk will magically blend the various flavors into something palatable. Except that tends to work out pretty well, while this is just a wet mess of high-fructose corn syrup with a new Meghan Trainor song slapped over the end credits dance-along (a perfect match of music and image).
It’s a movie about so many different things at once that it comes to feel like a movie about nothing, or at least it could have if not for the fact that a clear theme ultimately emerges from the silence. A theme that seems to be weighing heavily on Seinfeld’s mind as of late, even if he lets another speak the line of dialogue that best defines it: “It’s such a hard job, making people laugh.”
Grade: D
“Unfrosted” will be available to stream on Netflix starting Friday, May 3.
