Unfrosted

Jerry Seinfeld's debut as a feature film director tells the story of the race between Kellogg's and Post to invent a revolutionary new breakfast pastry. The film is completely fictionalized, so it doesn't really fall into last year's wave of business biopics—Blackberry, Air, Tetris, The Beanie Bubble, Dumb Money, Flamin’ Hot, Spinning Gold—nor is it really a satire of that new genre. The film falls more in the category of Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022), which, though technically a genre parody, was more of a loose, completely fictionalized narrative framework used to showcase a bunch of comedians and comic actors without asking any of them to work too hard. Films of this ilk are essentially feature-length Funny or Die videos, and how you feel about them can be predicted by whether or not you make it all the way through any of the content on that website or if you always turn them off after a minute or so of not laughing. I'm in the latter camp because celebrity-driven high-concept comedy of this sort always promises to be good because of a clever premise but almost never delivers much past the initial set-up and the fact of who is participating. Unfrosted does have a fun concept. It imagines this minor corporate battle between the two cereal titans as if it were the space race between the US and the Soviet Union. That's clever, and the exaggerated 1960s period art direction is cool to look at. But, like pretty much any film that features wall-to-wall cameos of famous funny folks in lieu of actual comedy writing, the picture just lays there like a frosted flake that's been sitting in milk for hours.

Seinfeld plays an executive at Kellogg's, loosely based on Pop-Tart inventor William Post. The former sitcom superstar basically does the Seinfeld thing we know him for. Since he appears in most scenes with Jim Gaffigan, as the head of Kellogg's, and/or Melissa McCarthy, as a NASA food scientist who joins the Pot-Tart team, Seinfeld looks pretty good. Next to these two one-note wonders, Seinfeld actually comes across as having range and nuance as an actor for about fifteen minutes. Of course, he'll never be the type of actor who can carry an entire movie the way McCarthy occasionally has. Seinfeld may have impeccable stage timing, but he has zero idea how to pace a movie comedy. Every scene is treated like an individual joke, and since most performers feel like they were just told to show up and do their stuff, none of these jokes feel very connected to the individuals delivering them. Every stand-up knows how much time and work goes into crafting a perfect routine for the stage, so why, when they make movies, do they believe that they can just call a bunch of their funny friends in for a day of shooting, wind them up in front of a camera, and expect that something worthy of putting in a movie will happen?

Unfrosted does feature a few genuine actors who manage a laugh or two, like Peter Dinklage, Christian Slater, Jon Hamm, and especially Hugh Grant (the only cast member with a part more considerable than a cameo who manages to bring enough variation that it doesn't just feel like the exact same joke being driven into the ground every time he shows up). But the rest of the cast is populated with stand-ups, sketch comedians, and improvisers doing tedious schtick that, without a live audience or laugh track, just hangs there lifelessly within the context of an uninspired scene. Bill Burr, playing John F. Kennedy, was the only comedian who made me laugh in this entire picture.