Review: Unfrosted (2024)

What happened to Jerry Seinfeld? The comedian used to be the king of TV sitcoms in the 1990s and wisely ended Seinfeld before that iconic sitcom had jumped the shark. Now, he lingers around in the culture, only occasionally popping up to offer tired takes on politics and cameo in projects starring some of his famous comedian friends. And then Netflix throws a massive amount of cash at Seinfeld and tells him he can make a dream project (only his second directorial credit after the mediocre Bee Movie from 2007), and this is what he comes up with? From Seinfeld, we knew that he loves breakfast cereal, but surely, this can’t be his dream project? Sadly, Unfrosted plays like an Avengers film for people who have wet dreams about cornflakes.

This cameo-filled farce about the origin of Pop-Tarts longs to be one of those 1960s madcap comedies that starred every person in Hollywood and their mother and didn’t care too much about coherence or tone, just about zany gags. The movie’s certainly madcap (it’s mercifully short) and chock-full of bizarre sequences and endless cameos. But like the comedic Casino Royale from 1967, it’s also overstuffed and undercooked, like some bad Pop-Tarts—or maybe that’s descriptive of ordinary Pop-Tarts.

Unfrosted is also a movie made by and for people whose brains have been so scrambled by the prospect of nostalgia that they worship the crappy products of the eras they grew up in. I’m reminded of one of those terrible memes about Nickelodeon's Gak or Pogs: “Remember these?” These are also the sort of people to ooh and ahh about references to even the people who made the products!

In Unfrosted, we get a parade of This Girls and That Guys of Hollywood playing the people who made the products we throw out when our parents die. The Schwinn bicycle guy! Jake LaLanne from the bad infomercials! Chef Boyardee! These people aren’t beloved. These people are mascots, and yet, Unfrosted rolls them out like they’re our first glimpses of Black Panther in Captain America: Civil War, Thanos in the after-credits scene of The Avengers, or the future scene where we presumably learn that Victor von Doom is a multiverse variant of Tony Stark. Sure, you can criticize Marvel all you want and say that their movies are commercial ventures through and through, that they’ve poisoned Hollywood far more than an Unfrosted ever could, but at least the affection that the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies weaponize is an affection for characters, not products.

Unfrosted adores products, commerce, the empty, heartless affectation of a past that’s artificial and shallow. Most importantly, it’s not funny. Perhaps there are some bizarre tangents that bring out a befuddled guffaw, but no belly laughs and rarely a polite chuckle. Nevertheless, this vanity project is truly an abysmal failure. It’s not so much the kind of movie that epitomizes Netflix house style. It may look like a TV show, but it doesn’t have the grey sheen and generic straight-to-video approach of a Red Notice, for instance. Rather, it’s the yang to The Irishman’s yin, showing that handing over a massive amount of cash and creative license to a legend in the industry can produce a dud as soon as it produces a great movie. It also makes us question whether Seinfeld’s comedic approach that was gold in the 1990s (gold, Jerry, gold), and remains excellent in syndication has anything new to offer in 2024.

There’s an early scene in Unfrosted that captures the film’s essence, where Jerry Seinfeld’s Kellogg’s consigliere excitedly leads Jim Gaffigan’s Mr. Kellogg and Melissa McCarthy’s cereal inventor to a room in the Kellogg’s building filled with cereal dispensers giving out every kind of cereal you could imagine at any hour of the day. We see a rabid succession of shots showing cereal flowing out of the dispensers in slow motion. Jerry and the others dig into the goods with a lustful abandon. The camera delights in the glory of what it’s beholding, as if the people behind the camera are leaning in and gasping, oh, what a paradise! Sure, you could argue it’s all satirical, that it’s referencing Willy Wonka and making fun of the sugary appetites of Americans, but you can see the glee on Seinfeld’s face and the wonder of the camera. Arguments of satire are cope. Rather, the scene is a pathetic fantasy, and the thesis of a film that misfires on almost every level.

2 out of 10

Unfrosted (2024, USA)

Directed by Jerry Seinfeld; written by Jerry Seinfeld, Spike Feresten, Andy Robin, and Barry Marder; starring Jerry Seinfeld, Melissa McCarthy, Jim Gaffigan, Max Greenfield, Hugh Grant, Amy Schumer.

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