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Sa veteran tandup Jerry Seinfeld makes his directorial debut with this decent family comedy that puts a surreal twist on the history of Pop-Tarts, one of America’s most beloved snacks: the utter silliness and one-off pointlessness are hilarious.
Seinfeld created the film with screenwriters Spike Feresten, Andy Robin and Barry Marder, the same writing team that worked on Bee movie, the animation that Seinfeld starred in, produced, and co-wrote in 2007. Unfrosted doesn’t quite have the Bee Movie feel, but it does have a steady stream of excellent gags building to a rising crescendo of silliness, similar in effect to Seinfeld’s own trademark falsetto-hysterics declamation at the moment of ultimate realization of the joke. There are also some nice supporting roles and cameos, including an extraordinary double walk by Jon Hamm and John Slattery, recreating their Mad Men commercials personas Don Draper and Roger Sterling.
Seinfeld plays Bob, a Kellogg’s executive in the early 1960s working (of course) on a breakfast cereal whose genius, he says, is that you “eat and drink with one hand.” He works with Edsel Kellogg III (Jim Gaffigan), a descendant of the founder, and Donna Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy), a NASA scientist seconded to Kellogg’s, to develop her top-secret project: a jam-filled rectangular block of pastries that will be the next big thing in breakfast food.
The company is in a fierce race to get its idea into America’s homes first, ahead of its deadly rival Post, the cereal company headed by Marjorie Post, played by Amy Schumer. As the space race rages on, they’re all in for the fight of their lives as they invent Pop-Tarts.
Comedy isn’t entirely innocent, because almost every gaffe has something seductive about it. When the Kellogg’s team has to ask President Kennedy for a favor, he continues to exasperate: “Did you just ask me what I can do for you? Did you not hear my inaugural speech?” The president tells them that his wife gave him a great idea for a breakfast cereal called “Jackie-Os”; It’s not until much later that they realize that doesn’t make sense because surely his wife’s name is Jackie Kennedy? But they simply conclude that the president must have meant something like Cheerios.
On top of that, there’s some weird stuff about Bob having to wear 27th President William Howard Taft’s old morning suit to the White House because he didn’t have any other clothes, and we get an outrageous joke about Ed Harris as John Glenn’s appearance from the smoky remains in The Right Stuff. Overall, it’s not exactly a masterpiece, but it’s kind and funny in a way that’s a lot harder to achieve than it looks.
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