We experienced an explosion of Corporate Origin Story movies in 2023, from the four-star titles “Air” and “Blackberry” to the creative and inventive “Tetris” and the appropriately silly and funny “The Beanie Bubble,” to the formulaic “Flamin’ Hot.” The latest entry in the brand-name genre is Jerry Seinfeld’s Netflix movie “Unfrosted,” an astonishingly unfunny, deeply weird, live-action cartoon that is so clear-the-room dreadful it almost plays like a horror movie.
I’m surprised that director/co-writer/producer/star Seinfeld, one of the sharpest and most observant comedic minds of his generation, didn’t halt production halfway through, call time of death and apologize to everyone for wasting their time. “Unfrosted” is so consistently awful it makes the aforementioned “Flamin’ Hot” seem like “The Social Network.” If there was a thing called the IMDB Witness Protection Program whereby you could get your name taken off the credits of a particular project, this would be that project.
Whereas “Air” et al., were fictionalized to varying degrees but still had some connection to true events, Seinfeld and his co-writers opted for a story that contains maybe 5% of the established, bare-bones story about the birth of the Pop-Tart, and uses that as the foundation for a garish, deeply unclever series of scenes that play like didn’t-make-the-cut sketches from “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.” Time and again, weird and off-putting triumphs over inventive and endearing.
The framing device for “Unfrosted” has Seinfeld’s Bob Cabana seated next to a runaway kid in a diner and telling him “the real story” of the birth of the Pop-Tart, “in the early ’60s, [when] the American morning was defined by milk and cereal.” Cue the flashback to our main story, which is set in a “Don’t Worry Darling”-looking version of Battle Creek, Michigan, with the cereal companies Post and Kellogg’s fighting “tooth and tongue to win,” as Bob puts it.
Turns out Bob is a top young (youngish?) Kellogg’s executive who reports directly to Edsel Kellogg III (Jim Gaffigan), a buffoonish blowhard who is locked in an ongoing duel with Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer), as each company strives to win the Breakfast Race, which eventually becomes so heated that President John F. Kennedy (Bill Burr) and Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev (Dean Norris) get involved. Among Bob’s duties: overseeing the production of Kellogg’s TV commercials, with a criminally miscast Hugh Grant as a fastidious version of the legendary and deep-voiced Thurl Ravenscroft, who plays Tony the Tiger, and Kyle Mooney, Mikey Day and Drew Tarver as Snap, Crackle and Pop, respectively.
This is one of the many inexplicable elements in “Unfrosted” — Grant plays Ravenscroft, who plays Tony the Tiger, but Snap, Crackle and Pop are depicted not as actors, but as individuals named Snap, Crackle and Pop. They seem to have no normal human alter egos; they’re never out of character. The same goes for Chef Boyardee (Bobby Moynihan) and Isaiah Lamb (Andy Daly), aka the Quaker Oats guy. These characters are depicted not as actors playing roles, but as the living embodiments of their respective brands.
To make matters more confusing, they interact with “real” people such as Steve Schwinn (Jack McBrayer), Jack LaLanne (James Marsden) and Harold von Braunhunt (Thomas Lennon), the huckster known for gimmicks such as X-ray specs and “Amazing Sea Monkeys.” Why are those latter characters from other fields in a Pop-Tarts movie? Mainly so that “Unfrosted” can waste an inordinate amount of time on scenes that parody “The Right Stuff” (including a particularly tasteless joke about Gus Grissom). We also get inside gags referencing “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now.” Timely!
Melissa McCarthy plays a NASA scientist recruited by Bob to join the Kellogg’s team that is trying to invent a fruit pastry before Post can get its similar product on shelves. For no reason whatsoever, we occasionally cut to clips of Walter Cronkite (Kyle Dunnigan) delivering the news, with “Unfrosted” callously turning Cronkite into a bumbling, booze-soaked fool with the mind of a child.
Jokes fall flat and hard, as when Edsel Kellogg reads the newspaper and says, “Ooh, Vietnam, that seems like a good idea,” or when we’re subjected to an extended funeral scene in which a grieving widow doesn’t understand why all these breakfast cereal mascots are mourning her husband. Late in the game, we get an extended “action” sequence that is designed to satirize the Jan. 6 insurrection, and it’s so bad and poorly shot it’s as if everyone involved in the movie has just given up. Still, as terrible as all of that is, nothing can prepare you for a subplot involving some sort of live and very creepy “Sea Monkey Ravioli” creature.
“Unfrosted” is one of the worst films of the decade so far.
