To generously take a bowl is half super approach, Jerry Seinfeld’s Unfrosted features stand-up Kyle Dunnigan doing a pretty killer Walter Cronkite impression. His anchor recounts the news with trademark authority followed by darkly amusing off the air grumblings about his love life and alcoholism. Later on, Dunnigan follows up with an impressive Johnny Carson takeoff. There’s lots of comedians and comedic performers in the legendary Mr. Seinfeld’s directorial debut for Netflix. Most of them don’t get the chance to nail their brief screen time like Mr. Dunnigan. A lot of Unfrosted, a mostly fictional account of how Pop-Tarts came to be, consists of stale humor with too many subplots competing against one another.
Even 96 minutes feels long since there’s barely enough witty material for the 22 minutes Jerry used to work in. He plays Bob Cabana, a high level exec at Kellogg’s in 1963. This is one of those screenplays (by Seinfeld and his frequent collaborators Spike Feresten, Andy Robin, and Barry Marder) that constantly reminds us it’s set during that decade in increasingly lame ways. Along with his boss Edsel Kellogg III (Jim Gaffigan) and Melissa McCarthy’s NASA scientist turned cereal conglomerate employee, they are in a race to produce the best toasted pastry treat. In Battle Creek, Michigan, the combat lines are drawn with their rival Post led by socialite Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer). Such lines are not so subtly tied to another race – the space one – of that era.
Rhythms of Unfrosted becomes familiar in short order – a joke or two that work about a given subplot (like the correlation with the nation’s trip to the moon) that get overused swiftly. There’s bursts of inspiration like Dunnigan’s grousing. Bill Burr’s take on JFK is also a delight. Most of the time I wasn’t blown away by what else the overfilled screenplay had to say.
Since this is Seinfeld we’re talking about, there’s lots of funny people popping in for a day or two on the set. Hugh Grant is the very real Thurl Ravenscroft, a true Shakespearean thespian who voiced Tony the Tiger. The Kellogg gang recruits a hodgepodge of kitschy historical figures including fitness guru Jack LaLanne (James Marsden), Sea Monkeys maker and maybe Nazi Harold von Braunhut (Thomas Lennon), and Chef Boy Ardee (Bobby Moynihan) to develop the product. I could go on and on. Mixing all these talents together is bound to produce some amusing highlights and it does on occasion, but not nearly enough. Sometimes the satire totally misses like when it attempts to connect a mascot uprising to January 6th.
A lot of Unfrosted probably sounded better while Seinfeld and crew were discussing it over Zoom. Most of it might produce more guffaws if its Cronkite impersonator were handling the delivery.
** (out of four)
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