Jerry Seinfeld is one of America’s most famous and successful comics. He’s now also a director after stepping into the role for the first time for Netflix’s Unfrosted.
The movie was born out of Pop-Tart jokes from Seinfeld’s 2020 Netflix stand-up special, 23 Hours to Kill, motivated by Seinfeld’s fascination with the need to create such an oddly specific kind of product. In the joke, Seinfeld calls the pastry both a life-changing food for his childhood self, and something with the nutritional value of a cardboard box. This extended setup about the nutritional value of big-brand breakfast cereal frames some of the most successful gags in Unfrosted — a movie that is otherwise as unsubstantial as the food that inspired it.
Unfrosted fictionalizes the story of the creation of the Pop-Tart as a kind of arms race between Kelloggs and Post, as the industrialized-food giants attempt to nail down the perfect recipe for a shelf-stable, easily-preparable breakfast pastry that they believe will solve all their companies’ problems. The milk mafia led by Christian Slater and Peter Dinklage, the sugar mafia led by Felix Solis, Soviet Union First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev (played by Dean Norris), a couple of dumpster diving rascals (newcomers Eleanor Sweeney and Bailey Sheetz), President John F. Kennedy (a hilarious Bill Burr), unionized cereal box mascots led by Hugh Grant’s Thurl Ravenscroft AKA Tony the Tiger, and a ravioli/sea monkey crossover lab abomination all get in the way of the companies’ success. If that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is.
Seinfeld plays Bob Cabana, Kelloggs’ star executive who teams up with Melissa McCarthy’s Donna Stankowski (for some reason intentionally referred to by the androgynous name form of “Stan” before she’s introduced) to come up with the product that will get Kelloggs comfortably leading the race against their rival concern, led by Amy Schumer’s Marjorie Post. The real creator of the Pop-Tart, William Post, died in February of this year, aged 96. The film then evolves in so many different directions, enlisting so many different distractingly famous faces for the job, that there’s hardly one that’s sufficiently fleshed out to create any significant investment from the viewer.
James Marsden, Thomas Lennon, Bobby Moynihan, Adrian Martinez, and Jack McBrayer play a team of bozo experts enlisted by Cabana and Stan to come up with the perfect fruit pastry recipe, all inspired by real-life American businessmen who introduced all kinds of products in the food industry in the 1960s.
The movie’s connections to the facts are thin. Instead, Seinfeld satirizes the cereal industry, and, in Unfrosted‘s best moments, manages to both criticize it and celebrate it at once. The quality of the products and just how something that processed, fake, and loaded up on sugar can find its way to shelves is a recurring joke that lands every time. There are quite a few jabs at the advertising business, too, like when they expose Sea Monkeys for essentially being dressed-up brine shrimp eggs, and when a marketing pitch uses sex and women to sell something completely unrelated to either. Then there’s a moment when all the actors behind the different cereal brands’ mascots decide to protest their working conditions which, like everything else in the film, is ridiculed and played for laughs, but, if one really squints, it could almost be read as a commentary on the latest Hollywood strikes.
It’s not surprising there is a lot of great material in the film, seeing that comedy, of course, is Seinfeld’s strongest suit. However, a succession of really good jokes doesn’t make a good movie, even if it contributes to its “watchability.” Seinfeld mines every little crevice of a topic for laughs, which leaves little space for breathing room or moments of reflection, particularly when the joke shoehorns unrelated, hard-to-combine subjects into the same punch line.
The heavily referential aspect of certain jokes also assumes that the viewer will enter the film heavy-laden with American pop culture knowledge, encompassing everything from JFK and Marilyn Monroe, to knowing who Jack LaLanne is. Seeing as Pop-Tarts aren’t even commonly found in retail shops around the rest of the world, it’s safe to say Unfrosted will not land as well with international audiences as it will domestically, which is rarely Netflix’s modus operandi.
To add to that, most of its non-American characters are familiar, tired clichés. You’ve got a menacing Puerto Rican cartel leader, a heavy Italian pasta chef with a thick accent, a racist German, and a posh British guy played by the ultimate posh British actor (Hugh Grant, in an uncharacteristically unabashed performance). In all the wrong ways, Unfrosted feels like it comes straight out of the ‘90s.
Then there’s the issue of the film’s pacing and style. Like the product it centers on, Unfrosted feels markedly catered to a younger audience or, at least, a very easily bored one. There’s so much happening on screen at any given time, as it is continuously propelled by frenetic editing, pace, and the most maximalist performances you can think of from its cast. In its busier moments, the movie could make Disney Channel feel like Tarkovsky.
There’s also a lack of stylistic coherence. Although Unfrosted tries to capture the aesthetics and quirks of the 1960s, visually it couldn’t be more 2024. Seinfeld sprinkles in occasional montages of archive footage, presumably in order to provide background information about the cultural significance of a particular scene to people who might not be as versed in the subject, but there’s hardly ever any other attempt to bring the film closer to the period it is set in — even the costume design is more akin to a costume of what someone would assume someone in the ‘60s dresses like.
After 2023’s Barbie, Unfrosted is this year’s feature-length advert: Family-friendly, overstuffed, and unoriginal, a comedy film whose weakness of plot is masked by myriad celebrity cameos —including 15 different stand-up comics — characters all but doing backflips on screen, and a lot of product placement. Then again, in the New York Times video linked above, where Seinfeld ironically details the process behind his 2020 comedy special Pop-Tart joke, the actor-turned-director says that “To waste that much time in something this stupid, that felt good to me.” And that explains a lot about Unfrosted.
