It’s always important to separate the filmmaker from the film and ignore all the related nonsense around releasing a new movie. So, when someone like comedian Jerry Seinfeld makes a broad and flippant statement about the film industry being “over” and chastising those who work in it for being earnest, diligent in their craft, and clueless about their impending demise, you have to just dash it to the rocks and move on. But Seinfeld’s new movie,” Unfrosted”— his feature-length narrative debut about cereal titans’ Post and Kellogg’s space-race-esque competition to create the Pop Tart, is so egregiously trifling, it’s tempting to suggest something wild like he knows it and is either trying to beat critics to the punch or just acting out in self-sabotage.
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Whatever the case, so shockingly wacky, glib, and insipid— like a cross between a live-action “Looney Tunes” and an unfunny “Saturday Night Live” sketch about “Mad Men” painfully stretched into a feature-length comedy—“Unfrosted” is knowingly absurd, but still, at times, borderline unwatchable. Taking its cues from AMC’s show about the golden age of advertising meets a live-action Saturday Morning Cartoon, filtered through Seinfeld’s ridiculous, inane, outdated sensibilities, “Unfrosted” feels like it was directed and written by the same people that made 1994’s “The Flintstones” movie and created in that same year. Or picture an imaginary 1995 “Jetsons” movie with the same ridiculously goofy tone, mash them together in a hackneyed story about cereal domination, and maybe that gives you an idea of how much of an unamusing, antiquated mess this movie is. Truthfully, its outrageous, often zany sitcom-ish energy is not without precedent. It’s a lot like the tenor of a massively budgeted feature-length version of “30 Rock,” if only every single disposable joke and gag missed by a mile and lacked the show’s cracklingly spark. There’s no Madison Avenue wit here, just the feeling of one who has spent too much out-of-touch time on Long Island.
“Unfrosted” starts with an uninspired framing device—Seinfeld telling the story of the Pop-Tarts creation as an excuse to segue into narration, but it’s so forgettable when it returns at the end, you’re almost surprised it existed in the first place. Set in 1963 in Battle Creek, Michigan, but in the similar “Mad Men”-seque mid-century modern design era where the 1950s aesthetics still rule the decade, Seinfeld stars as Bob Cabana, a high-level exec of Kellogg’s, who is basically the Don Draper of the company. He and his boss, Edsel Kellogg III (Jim Gaffigan), the head of Kellogg’s, are sitting pretty, the #1 cereal company in the country. But at the annual Breakfast Cereal Awards—where Kellogg’s handily dominates— something is amiss. Post, led by Cabana’s counterparts Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer), the head of a rival cereal company, and her loyal lieutenant Rick Ludwin (Max Greenfield), are all smiles and even acting cocky. Cabana thinks something is afoot, and his instincts are correct.
It turns out that Post is on the verge of creating a disruptive new breakthrough in breakfast pastry, essentially an embryonic form of the Pop-Tart. Snooping around the Post dumpsters—both companies spying on each other for their secrets is a theme— Cabana finds a group of Cabbage Patch Doll-like kids eating these delicious, not-quite-ready-for prime-time Tart treats. He takes a bite; his mind is blown—in the cartooniest, silliest way, of course—and he rushes back to tell his Kellog’s boss that the entirety of their cereal empire is in imminent jeopardy if they don’t immediately react with a counterstrike. Panicking, Cabana tells Kellogg he needs the brilliant mind of Stan, aka Donna Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy), an unpredictable wildcard and ex Kellog’s employee who quit, sick of the company’s lack of innovation and gone to work for the more trail blazingly-friendly NASA.
Re-recruited back into the fold, the trio, Stankowski, Kellogg, and Stankowski, race against the clock to create a rival breakfast pastry before Post goes to market. Already modeled around the 1960s space race between the Russians and the Americans and events of the 1960s, “Unfrosted” takes it one step further when Post begins to get cozy with the “Commies” in order to tap into Cuba’s sugar reserves. Kellogg’s seeks help through the White House, and the political undertones of mob influence, intimidating menace, and the forces of Organized Milk (no, really) all start to mirror the similar bubbling tensions of the Cuban Missile Crisis, only for the most important meal of the day. It’s almost like a 1960s “Forrest Gump” -ing for the breakfast wars.
By the time Jon Hamm and John Slattery show up as their same “Mad Men” characters—I wish I was joking—in a scene where they’re contemptibly pitching ideas to Kellog’s (“Why are they so mean? It’s just advertising!” Seinfeld says in trademark “Seinfeld” show “isn’t this so funny?” disbelief), it all feels like the “Scary Movie” franchise if it were dedicated to Matthew Weiner’s advertising-age series.
If there’s anything remarkable about “Unfrosted,” it’s the insanely enormously starry cast who are either way desperate to work with Seinfeld or just eager to get that Netflix check. Even for the tiniest, one-scene cameos are filled with names like Peter Dinklage, Maria Bakalova, Dean Norris, Dan Levy, Cedric the Entertainer, Fred Armisen, James Marsden, Jack McBrayer, Thomas Lennon, Tony Hale, etc. etc. etc appearing. The budget is impressive, too; you’ve never seen something this expensive-looking spent on something this frivolous. One supposes that was always the point of Seinfeld’s comedy: acute and droll observations about the most banal and ordinary things if only it weren’t so trite.
Bill Burr turns up as President Kennedy, Christian Slater plays an evil menacing Milkman, Mikey Day, Kyle Mooney and Drew Tarver play Snap, Crackle and Pop, Bobby Moynihan stars as Chef Boyardee (no, really), but it’s only “Insider Amy Schumer” writer Kyle Dunnigan as an arrogant version of news anchor Walter Cronkite that’s a consistently funny bit.
Hugh Grant stars as Thurl Ravenscroft, a mercurial actor cast as Tony the Tiger, who leads a union strike for actors playing cereal mascots—another tangential subplot of complications that is so half-heartedly written that it ends as if it has forgotten itself.
Seinfeld is clearly having a ball playing with the 1950s and ’60s cliches, aesthetics, motifs, and music, again 1950s “Mad Men” execs platitudes, retro-futurist notions from the space-age race, and a jazz/easy listing/space age orchestral score that plays like musical slapstick if only anyone else were having just as much fun. “Unfrosted” seems smugly self-satisfied throughout, too, the type of moving so in love with itself, it uses its credits to feature outtakes, bloopers, and additional scenes; God forbid someone misses one of these gems of comedy.
“Unfrosted” is, charitably, a very dated, painful watch, something that might have been funny and novel 30 years ago—like when Seinfeld was last relevant—but now just seems incredibly passe and even a little bit cringe and sad, like a dad trying to tell jokes to his deeply embarrassed teenage daughter. “Unfrosted” is wild insofar as, by Seinfeld’s own admission, it’s just an entire movie based on a small stand-up bit about Pop-Tarts blown up into a big, farcical, preposterous movie (once admitting, the idea was “not a movie”). And if it sounds incredibly slight, tedious, and barely justifying its existence, you wouldn’t be wrong. It’s maybe not excruciatingly bad, but certainly even less nourishing and satisfying than even the most fleeting and calorically empty of sugar highs. [D+]