Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Unfrosted’ on Netflix, Jerry Seinfeld’s Scattershot Assemblage of Dumb Jokes Posing as a Loony Spoof

Jerry Seinfeld has made possibly the most ridiculous movie since The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies, namely, Unfrosted (now on Netflix), a fake Pop-Tarts biopic. (Is “biopic” even the proper term for a movie detailing the phony origin of inanimate foodstuffs?) Anyone who’s seen Seinfeld’s stand-up in the past quarter-century or so knows he has a lengthy and detailed Pop-Tarts bit (and anyone who’s seen him more than once has most likely heard it more than once), and, well, that’s a movie now. Hooray? Seinfeld recently caused a furor on when he said some vaguely dopey Boomer stuff about “the wokes,” but it only serves to put more attention on this movie, which he staffed with approximately 300 funnypeople ranging from the merely famous to generation-spanning heavyweights (although that last one is just Seinfeld himself), most notably Jim Gaffigan, but only because he’s the stand-up who does all the goofy food jokes. So the movie has some star power going for it, as well as being a probably accidental spoof of birth-of-the-brand movies (see: those movies about Beanie Babies, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and the like) that clogged our eyeball holes in 2023. That alone might make Unfrosted worth a gander, key word being “might.”

UNFROSTED: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: BATTLE CREEK, MICHIGAN. THE EARLY ’60S. The cereal wars are at their peak. In one corner, Kellogg’s, as in Rice Krispies and Corn Flakes. In the other, Post, as in Alpha Bits and (shudder) Grape Nuts. Two corporate HQs, right across the street from each other. We meet Bob Cabana (Seinfeld), a higher-up at Kellogg’s who reports directly to the head honcho, Edsel Kellogg III (Gaffigan). They clean up at the annual Bowl and Spoon awards – even the coveted Easiest To Open Wax Bag trophy, PLEASE LAUGH! – but their rival Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer) is nonplussed about it. Not even upset. Not at all. What the hell does she have cookin’ over there? An idea for a fruit-filled pastry based on a recipe she stole from Kellogg’s, maybe? Well, crap. That seems to be it.

And that seems to be it for the plot, too, as the rest of the movie is about the race to make the thing that the movie is all about while trying not to make the movie too much like a blatant nose-to-ass commercial for various Kellogg’s products. (Note: It does not succeed. More on that in a minute.) In order to get a leg up on Post, Bob recruits the best of the best to formulate a pastry product: NASA scientist Donna Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy) leads a team including Chef Boyardee (Bobby Moynihan), the Schwinn bicycle guy (Jack McBrayer), the inventor of sea monkeys (Thomas Lennon), fitness guru Jack LaLanne (James Marsden) and some other people whose products were prominently featured in comic book ads of the era. (Hold tight for that SCORCHING HOT joke about X-ray spex!) This is just the beginning of the celeb parade, and I’ll stop myself from spoiling things so you may be underwhelmed by the drop-ins and cameos unfettered.

I can mention that Hugh Grant turns up as a thespian stooping to be the guy in the Tony the Tiger suit, and Sarah Cooper plays a Kellogg’s employee whose only reason to exist is to make us go, “Hey, isn’t that Sarah Cooper, the funny lady who posted the Trump lip-sync videos on Twitter during the pandemic?” Meanwhile, the competition between Marjorie Post and the Kellogg’s guys heats up like a thing you plug into the wall and put bread into to make it hot and crisp. Tony the Tiger leads a mascot strike, two children characters seem to live in various dumpsters, Bob and Edsel work every corporate-espionage angle to sabotage their rivals’ work, there’s recurring jokes about “buttock rashes,” early gags function as setups for later gags, we nearly drown in dopey mid-century nostalgia and are we worn out by all this yet? Yeah, kinda.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: At least Flamin’ Hot showed some heart amidst the somewhat controversial debate over its heavy truthiness.

Performance Worth Watching: McCarthy draws the bulk of the film’s far-too-few laughs, proving once again – after many painful mediocrities like The Starling and Thunder Force – that she’s skilled at finding a few flakes of gold in a truckload of lead. 

Memorable Dialogue: Sample exchange that’s a good example of the type of comedy we get here: 

Bob: Did you get my memo about the frogman prize inside? Some kids are eating them.

Edsel: They’re frogmen. They’ll find their way out.

Sex and Skin: The Pop-Tarts don’t have frosting on them, so that technically makes them naked.

Our Take: Let’s get this out of the way right now: Unfrosted’s only commentary on “the wokes” is the throwaway line, “You can’t say ‘hobo’ anymore. They prefer ‘bum,’” which for my nickel is more of an observation about the evolution of language in the popular lexicon. I mean, can you BELIEVE people use different words for things than they did five or 10 or even 50 years ago? WHAT is the DEAL with that? 

Apologies for the hacky shit, and I promise I won’t indulge anymore from here on out, including a marked avoidance of cornball “soggy cereal” or “this Pop-Tart spent too much time in the toaster”-type metaphors. I will say the “hobo” bit is one of the better jokes here, among the 900 or so that comprise the script, by Seinfeld and his writing team of Andy Robin, Barry Marder and Spike Feresten. They piece together gag after skit after one-liner and land remarkably few of them. Seinfeld seems to be aiming for… something? What could it be? Satire? Nostalgia? Off-the-hinges spoofery? I’m not sure. It could be he’s aiming for precisely nothing, but as we know all too well, he’s done that before, and far, far better. 

There’s a story here, a corporate competition that winkingly parallels the Cold War and the Space Race, but that bit of inspiration dies with a sigh as Unfrosted shows a marked inability to focus on anything, as if it ate too much ultra-sugary you-know-what and spent the rest of the morning twitching like a methed-out chihuahua. The period details look good and expensive, the set pieces and costumes bursting with color, thus showing some sense of vision; perhaps the goal is to appeal to the child inside recent suburbanite retirees, and reminisce on the time period with equal parts warmth and typically Seinfeldian nihilism. Not, as they say, that there’s anything wrong with that, but this thing nearly becomes Cutaway Gag: The Movie as it waffles and diddlefarts and screws around, in increasingly grating fashion, miring potentially funny ideas (the Milk Mafia; a South American sugar cartel) within too many dumbass bits (a runaway monster that’s a hybrid of a sea monkey colony and a ravioli) and rapid-fire celeb cameos that seem engineered to distract us from the fact that this movie has no purpose whatsoever. Considering the ongoing too-easy commentary about the unhealthiness of heavily sugared pseudofood for children, even the movie’s existence as a cynical exercise in product placement is half-assed.

As ever, comedy is subjective. Jokes that might land in your house are just as likely to feel like they’re landing on mine – I can already hear apologists saying they laughed at Unfrosted more than they didn’t, which justifies their time, and that’s fair enough. But that’s a long way of saying your mileage may vary, and wildly. Seinfeld the sitcom has aged well, but that may be Larry David’s influence, as Seinfeld’s stand-up and general sensibility is increasingly creaky. It’s strange how a staple of Seinfeld’s stand-up translates so passionlessly to this movie – he’s been doing that bit so long, you’d think it’d be something he actually cares about. But there’s very little intent here beyond being a parade of big, dumb jokes that are too silly by half. There’s also the unavoidable sense that a movie isn’t the best place for these jokes, that Seinfeld lazily threw together bits that worked fine on stage and called it good. 

Our Call: Apologies in advance: Unfrosted flails fruitlessly. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.