The biggest joke in Unfrosted is the one told before a single frame rolls: Can you believe they made a movie about the creation of Pop-Tarts? It’s the sort of rhetorical question that has served Jerry Seinfeld very well throughout his career as a stand-up, sitcom star, and comedian in cars getting coffee. But it’s also one that Seinfeld asks half-heartedly in his first outing as a movie director. A few too many shrugs and long stretches between laughs leave this Netflix comedy feeling limp and lifeless, and there’s only so much a very recognizable supporting cast of Melissa McCarthy, Hugh Grant, Jim Gaffigan, and Amy Schumer can do to restore Unfrosted’s lost crunch.
Within its exaggerated telling of a true, corporate-approved story – somebody had to sign off on the big, red “K”s stamped all over this thing – Unfrosted builds a gloriously cockamamie sandbox in which the Kellogg’s and Post breakfast dynasties are the Montagues and Capulets of Battle Creek, Michigan, and the fight to perfect a shelf-stable toaster pastry is akin to the geopolitical grappling of global superpowers. The landscape of this sugar-frosted world is dotted with scenes of inspired lunacy: Wall-to-wall slapstick mishaps at a NASA training facility, or a Pop-Tart engineer who died on the job and is buried with “full cereal honors.” (Imagine an open grave filled with milk, surrounded by Rice Krispies mascots Snap, Crackle, and Pop in Scottish bagpiper getups.) Unfrosted knows how silly this all looks and sounds, but it can’t resist the urge to poke at and undermine its cartoon logic, a task that frequently falls to Seinfeld himself in his role as Kellogg’s exec Bob Cabana. During the aforementioned funeral sequence – after Cornelius the Corn Flakes Rooster lowers the casket into the ground but before Toucan Sam sings “Ave Maria” – the widow turns to Bob and asks “Did you plan this?” All Bob can offer back is a deflating, “I don’t know.”
The comedy legend may be overextended here. He’s the director, co-writer, and star of Unfrosted, and none of those roles is getting his best. As on his namesake sitcom, Seinfeld makes up for his inability to play any character other than “Jerry Seinfeld” by surrounding himself with more gifted and natural actors, but they’re all riffing on their established personas, too. In addition to Seinfeld as everyman Bob, you get Jim Gaffigan’s flustered failson heir Edsel Kellogg III and Melissa McCarthy as fiery foodstuff whiz Donna Stankowski. But character names are largely irrelevant because none of the leads are really stretching here – these are performances that are as familiar and reliable as a box of Frosted Flakes, with Hugh Grant and Max Greenfield essentially reprising their respective roles in Paddington 2 and New Girl.
Which isn’t to say there’s no joy in hearing Greenfield put his unique, over-enunciated mustard on the word “buttock.” But so much of comedy is in the element of surprise, which is probably why Unfrosted’s biggest laughs come from the more malleable sketch-comedy veterans appearing in bit parts: Saturday Night Live’s Kyle Mooney huffing through a dressing down from Cabana, or Reno 911’s Thomas Lennon refashioning Sea Monkeys tycoon Harold von Barunhut as a German scientist who’d prefer not to answer questions about his whereabouts during the years 1933 through 1945. The film invests too much of its visual humor in funny costumes, but Andy Daly is a nonstop hoot as the sanctimonious embodiment of the Quaker Oats label.
Given all the talent behind it, that Unfrosted isn’t one slam dunk gag after the next only makes its slipshod construction more apparent. A handful of lines on the level of Daly’s, “Heathens! Let the grains speak for themselves!” can’t camouflage a working relationship between Bob and Donna that’s only complex because the script says it’s complex, or the dampened notes of villainy given to Schumer as real-life cereal magnate Marjorie Post. Seinfeld doesn’t establish much of a directorial vision for himself, content to let his cast do their thing within compositions that do little to transcend their office-and-boardroom scenery. Unfrosted’s mid-20th-century-Midwestern fantasy is Mad Men chic, but its walnut finishes and breeze blocks are done no favors by the textureless visual gloss that plagues this and so many other direct-to-streaming movies. Unfrosted was shot by The Matrix and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World cinematographer Bill Pope, though you’d never know by looking at it.
Yet through all of that, at least Seinfeld’s voice comes through. The comedian who made his name by elevating and overanalyzing the trivial has now done so at cinematic scale – lampooning the very notion that any of this is a subject worthy of a movie or the time you’ll spend watching it in the process. There’s not a lot of fresh material in Unfrosted (which took root out of a stand-up routine), but it’s all recognizably Seinfeld: The fixations on the pop-culture flotsam and jetsam of his ’50s and ’60s childhood. The elliptical comic exchanges wrapped around funny-sounding words like “goo” and “pectin.” Bowl after bowl after bowl of cereal. Unfrosted is not a very good movie, or an overly quotable one, but it is remarkably personal for what amounts to a 90-minute Pop-Tart ad. What other filmmaker would give over the most rapturous sequence of his debut feature to a montage of cascading flakes and loops set to “Can’t Take My Eyes off You”?
