Unfrosted movie review: Jerry Seinfeld’s zany comedy satirises Netflix’s obsession with snackable content

unfrosted review

Jerry Seinfeld in a still from Unfrosted. (Photo: Netflix)

For a billionaire who knows that he doesn’t have to work a single day in his life, Jerry Seinfeld has certainly been operating like an up-and-comer who has no choice but to say yes to anything that comes his way. This couldn’t be further from the truth, of course. But even though the celebrated comedian has starred in only two films, neither of them — at least on paper — scream passion project. And after the animated oddity Bee Movie nearly two decades ago, Seinfeld has returned with perhaps something even stranger. Released on Netflix, Unfrosted — which recounts how Pop-Tarts were invented — might appear on the cardboard packaging to be yet another corporate origin story in the vein of Blackberry or Air, but once you scrutinise its contents, you realise that it is more acidic than sugary.

Unfolding like a children’s movie for adults — think of Unfrosted like a feature length Saturday Night Live spoof of Mad Men — the movie has little interest in facts, and exists in some sort of surreal alternate version of the 1960s, where feral children go dumpster-diving for discarded sweets treats, and nations devote their best resources to the creation of snacks. America’s top two cereal manufacturers — Kellogg’s and Post, who have headquarters across the street, enabling their owners to peer at each other through comical binoculars — are caught in a breakfast race to create the next big morning food item.

Seinfeld stars as Bob Cabana, a Kellogg’s employee who learns that Post is working on a goo-filled snack that could disrupt the cereal business. He takes this information to his boss, Edsel Kellogg III (a bumbling Jim Gaffigan), who immediately sanctions a dream team to beat Marjorie Post (a conniving Amy Schumer) to it. The film’s central gag — Seinfeld also serves as co-writer and director — is to closely model this contest on the Space Race, or the Manhattan Project.

unfrosted

Max Greenfield and Amy Schumer as in Unfrosted.

Much of the movie’s first act is devoted to Bob, like Oppenheimer himself, rounding up a crack team of brilliant minds to aid Kellogg’s in this race. It’s a bizarre premise, made all stranger by the presence of dozens of celebrities appearing in quick cameos as historical figures and, in a handful of cases, manifestations of corporate entities. For instance, Bob’s team consists of Steve Schwinn (the man behind the Schwinn bicycle) and Tom Carvel (the inventor of soft serve ice cream), but he also bumps into the actual Chef Boyardee and the Quaker Oats guy. We aren’t encouraged to ask questions. The team also includes — like the Apollo programme and the Manhattan Project — a runaway Nazi, played by Thomas Lennon like a child caught red-handed. The joke is that nobody acknowledges his criminal past, even though he keeps making increasingly obvious references to it. “I want to go to Argentina,” he says in one scene.

Speaking of South America, all the sugar in this bonkers world is controlled by a man named El Sucre. Clearly (and rather hilariously) modelled on your average drug kingpin, El Sucre agrees to funnel all the sugar in his possession to Kellogg’s after a tense meeting with Bob; it’s their biggest victory yet. Controlling the flow of sugar in the breakfast industry is like controlling deposits of uranium during the nuclear race. Soon, politicians get involved. While Bob and the Kellogg’s team visit a sleazy John F Kennedy, who becomes increasingly impatient because they’re delaying his threesome appointment, Marjorie attempts to arm-twist Nikita Khrushchev, who speaks in grunts. Updates about the breakfast wars are telecast on the prime time news, read by Walter Cronkite in the throes of a midlife crisis.

The aggressive absurdism of Unfrosted is unrelenting, and the experience isn’t unlike watching a zany cartoon. But that’s the exact tone that Seinfeld and his co-writers are going for. They cram in so many jokes per minute that even if you were to miss one or two — somebody hails the invention of an artificial sweetener called ‘carcin-o-sweet’ — there’s always something else to chuckle at. Some gags are more elaborate than others, of course. There’s a quick punchline about the late astronaut Gus Grisholm’s remains being mixed up with ‘monkey parts’, a reference to a viral Bill O’Reilly meme, and hat-tips to not one but two Francis Ford Coppola films.

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Hugh Grant as Thurl in Unfrosted.

And then there’s the climax, which, of all things, satirises the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, making Unfrosted the second movie in as many months to use this recent historical event as a key plot point. And although nobody would’ve expected it, Unfrosted has proven to be about as divisive as Civil War. There is, however, more to this movie than its rapid-fire gags and a star-studded cast. Not just the food industry, Unfrosted works as a sneaky satire of Netflix itself – where else would you find overqualified celebrities devoting their time and energy to empty projects that are singlehandedly contributing to the decline of good taste, while everybody pretends like they’re changing the world?

Unfrosted

Director – Jerry Seinfeld

Cast – Jerry Seinfeld, Melissa McCarthy, Amy Schumer, Jim Gaffigan, Hugh Grant

Rating – 4/5

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