It’s rubbish day one morning in 1963 in Battle Creek, Michigan. Whereas he’s on his strategy to work, a Kellogg’s worker named Robert Cabana sees two youngsters climb straight right into a dumpster. They’re fortunately shoveling breakfast pastries down their maw, cheeks ruddied by the strudel’s crimson sludge. It’s trash, Cabana tells them. “Is it?” the lady responds. “Or is it some scorching fruit lightning the person doesn’t need you to have?” She fingers it over to Cabana, and one chunk ends in sensory euphoria: He’s by no means tasted something prefer it.
Cabana (Jerry Seinfeld) wasn’t an actual particular person — he’s a unfastened approximation of the recently-deceased William Publish — and in actual life, Kellogg’s most likely wasn’t impressed to create the product later known as Pop-Tarts by two ravenous youngsters trawling via a sea of rubbish. Regardless of such artistic liberties, this scene is likely one of the few moments of levity that feels true, not compelled, in Seinfeld’s directorial characteristic debut Unfrosted, out now on Netflix. The movie attracts from the precise Chilly Warfare-era arms race between two breakfast meals giants, Kellogg’s and its rival Publish, to revolutionize America’s morning meals by placing a flat rectangular crust crammed with jelly on grocery store cabinets. Regardless of the comedic potential of its premise, Unfrosted’s diversions really feel noncommittal, even half-baked.
Unfrosted comes at a time when company origin tales, notably within the realm of meals, appear to have seized the eye spans of studios. See, for instance, Eva Longoria’s directorial debut Flamin’ Sizzling (2023), the story of the supposed inventor of Flamin’ Sizzling Cheetos, a Mexican-American janitor-turned-Frito Lay government named Richard Montañez (whose claims of origination have been disputed). The place Longoria sought to humanize Montañez by paying tribute to his struggles, Seinfeld takes a markedly totally different strategy, attempting to lean into his narrative’s inherent ridiculousness.
The story, advised in flashback, begins in a time when Kellogg’s reigns supreme over the breakfast area, outpacing the straggling Publish. Kellogg’s mascots like Tony the Tiger (Hugh Grant) are populating American airwaves and doing grocery retailer meet and greets. But Publish threatens to encroach upon Kellogg’s territory by creating Nation Squares, the jammy autos of gastronomic marvel these youngsters have been consuming within the trash.
After getting wind of Publish’s plans, Cabana and his superior at Kellogg’s (Jim Gaffigan) determine they’ll beat Publish at this recreation. They enlist the assistance of Donna Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy), a scientist who defects from her NASA job to plot a brand new product in Kellogg’s artistic laboratory. Kellogg’s assembles a ragtag workforce of quasi-celebrities — health dreamboat Jack LaLanne (James Marsden), the mustachioed Chef Boyardee (Bobby Moynihan), ice cream entrepreneur Tom Carvel (Adrian Martinez) — to assist gin up curiosity in no matter will end result from the train.
The physique of this quick however jaggedly paced movie is peppered with moments of strained humor. Intrusive music cues anticipate punchlines, not often letting the film breathe. A recurring joke includes an oversharing Walter Cronkite (Kyle Dunnigan) who, after soberly summarizing the newest happenings within the breakfast wars, punctuates his broadcasts with laments about his misbegotten private life. Right here, as elsewhere through the movie, Seinfeld’s directorial intuition is to linger on gags that don’t fairly land, and this comes on the expense of extra cautious world-building. Earlier than too lengthy, Unfrosted begins to really feel like a squandered comedian alternative.
Seinfeld’s alternative of this subject material for his first feature-length directorial outing may seem like a pure match for his comedian sensibilities: Few are higher suited than Seinfeld to search out the absurdity in one thing as ubiquitous, even mundane, as a Pop-Tart. This very ethos was the great thing about his eponymous sitcom, nonetheless justly beloved a long time after its finish. What helped that present have such endurance was the truth that Seinfeld himself, in a starring position, was the straight man. When he delivered his strains, Seinfeld at all times gave the impression to be on the cusp of bursting into laughter, even when his co-stars not often risked breaking character. That distinction allowed him to perform as an efficient viewers surrogate. However this high quality of his as an actor doesn’t work fairly as properly on the broader filmic canvas of Unfrosted, the place he has few such foils: One will get the sense that lots of his co-stars (notably Amy Schumer because the snipingly — and unconvincingly — antagonistic Marjorie Publish) are partaking in a skit whose conceit they don’t at all times purchase.
The key exceptions are Melissa McCarthy and Hugh Grant. The position of the rogue NASA scientist Stankowski could be very a lot inside McCarthy’s wheelhouse — raucous, with the occasional dose of vulgarity — however she commits to the bit totally, even detecting bitter notes within the script when males in energy routinely look proper previous her, as if she doesn’t exist on this testosterone-heavy company world. Grant performs a high-minded Shakespearean actor imprisoned in a cereal mascot’s costume. He abjectly hates slogging his approach via humiliating commercials shilling sugar. Grant cuts via the artifice surrounding him, turning into one of many few who looks like a flesh-and-blood particular person in a troupe of inventory characters.
Grant’s surliness remembers his equally efficient look in one other latest food-centric cinematic property, Paul King’s Wonka (2023), the place Grant, as a crabby Oompa Loompa, introduced that movie’s cloudy fantasies again right down to earth. What Seinfeld’s movie lacks, disappointingly, is the sense of caprice, even delight, that made a movie like King’s so particular in its remedy of meals. One can debate the culinary deserves of Pop-Tarts, nevertheless it’s tough to disclaim that they’ve introduced pleasure to many People all through generations. However such pleasure feels regrettably absent from Seinfeld’s movie. An early scene wherein McCarthy and Grant’s characters have interaction in a barbed tiff suggests what the movie might have been in additional succesful fingers: They’re two performers who consider within the product they’re promoting.
Mayukh Sen is the James Beard Award-winning creator of Style Makers (2021) and the forthcoming Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star (2025). His work has been anthologized in three editions of The Finest American Meals Writing.
