Jerry Seinfeld’s Pop-Tarts Movie ‘Unfrosted’ Is Unhinged In All the Wrong Ways

Unfrosted, the new Jerry Seinfeld-directed comedy coming to Netflix on May 3, takes great pains to not be a movie for kids.

This is a shame, because, much like the tasty treat the movie is named after, 11-year-olds could have been its prime target audience. Maybe if every other punchline wasn’t “Grandma’s hole,” or “JFK plowing the Double Mint twins,” then Unfrosted could have embraced its cartoonish tone and become a beloved kids’ movie like Big Fat Liar—a movie that doesn’t necessarily hold up as “good” in adulthood, but is nonetheless remembered fondly as a classic of a less mature era. Instead, Seinfeld forces adult humor and the dated references aimed at Boomers into a disjointed parody about a treat designed for children. The result leaves audiences to puzzle the question: Who the hell is this movie for?

At some point in the last year, the name of the movie changed from Unfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Story to simply Unfrosted. Perhaps that’s because very little of the movie is grounded in any sort of reality of the “true story” of how Pop-Tarts came to be. Seinfeld co-wrote the script with Spike Feresten, Barry Marder, and Andy Robin, which reimagines the invention of the Pop-Tart as an over-the-top, absurd, slapstick battle between rival cereal companies Kellogg and Post. (Apparently, there was a race between the companies to make a marketable breakfast pastry, but nearly all other details in the movie are made up.)

In Seinfeld’s version of events, the race is jump-started by two kids who go dumpster diving for “goo” behind the Post factory. Kellogg boss Edsel Kellogg (Jim Gaffigan) thinks this “goo” means his company is doomed. Unless, that is, his top employees Bob Cabana (Seinfeld) and Donna Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy) can invent a new, gooey breakfast treat of their own. They recruit a team of other brand-adjacent men, both real and fictional, including Chef Boyardee (Bobby Moynihan), Schwinn from Schwinn bicycles (Jack McBrayer), notorious white supremacist Harold Nathan Braunhut (Thomas Lennon), and fitness icon Jack LaLanne (James Marsden). There is no discernible reason for this bloated cast of eclectic characters, other than the half-finished joke of name-dropping once-famous figures from the ’60s. Battling the forces of the milk man mafia and the dangerous Puerto Rican sugar empire, the team sets out to design the next big breakfast item.

The list of celebrities who appear in this movie is so long, you’ll start to get bored of the “cameos” by minute ten. There’s Hugh Grant as the disgruntled, classically-trained actor behind Tony the Tiger. There’s Amy Schumer as the femme fatale head of Post. There’s Bill Burr as the shamelessly horny John F. Kennedy. There’s Saturday Night Live players Mikey Day and Kyle Mooney as Crackle and Snap, as well as The Other Two star Drew Tarver as Pop—the kind of kind of ridiculous, demeaning role that Carey Dubek might have happily auditioned for, in fact. And there are plenty of more celebrities that Netflix has asked press not to spoil, “in order to maintain the viewing experience for audiences.”

But it’s unclear what the intended viewing experience is. Pop-Tarts are for kids, but this movie definitely is not. As a satire of brand biopics, it fails to make any sharp, witty, or interesting observations about the genre. And though Unfrosted tries very hard to be unhinged, rarely did I find myself laughing with the movie. Maybe it’s because rather than a grounded, comprehensible, character-driven story enhanced by humor, Seinfeld half-heartedly tried to reverse-engineer movie around a classic Seinfeld bit: “What’s the deal with Pop-Tarts?” But he had little interest in character development, plot, rules for this bonkers universe, or indeed anything that makes a movie a movie.

Unfortunately—despite the talented cast doing the best they could with what they had—the jokes aren’t very funny, either. The absurd dialogue has kids saying things like, “hot fruit lightning,” which vaguely sounds like a joke on the surface, but, in fact, is just a collection of nonsense words. A riff on sugar as a metaphor for cocaine immediately falls flat. (Someone tell Jerry that the actual history of the sugar trade is way worse than cocaine!) And did you know that JFK was cheating on Jackie? Aren’t powerful men hilarious pigs?! The one laugh-out-loud scene in the movie—a cereal-theme funeral in which the Fruit Loops Toucan sings “Ava Maria”—might have made for a successful SNL sketch. In the context of Unfrosted, it’s completely disconnected from any of the main characters or story.

Seinfeld said himself in a recent red carpet interview that he had no interest in directing a movie before Unfrosted, and no interest in directing again. Unfrosted makes that abundantly clear. Surely there are better ways for him to spend his NBC money.