Unfrosted
America’s comic icon Jerry Seinfeld takes aim at the breakfast industry (and ‘Big Milk’) with a frantic fiasco.
Mascot mayhem: Hugh Grant as Tony the Tiger
One of the unending wonders of the cinema is its facility to educate. Recently there has been a spate of films following the evolution of well-known products, such as the Air Jordan trainer, the BlackBerry and the video game Tetris. Now comes the story of Kellogg's Pop Tarts, and we learn all sorts of fascinating stuff. Kellogg's – as it was known in 1964 – was located right beside its arch rival, the food manufacturer Post Cereals, famous for its Bran Flakes and Grape-Nuts. At the annual Cereal Awards, Kellogg’s once again sweeps the board, due, in fact, to the company’s backhanders. The company is also not against abusing the monopoly of sugar procurement, forcing Post to woo the industry of Nikita Khrushchev (Dean Norris) with such bespoke cereals as Krumb-Lins, Borscht Loops and “everyone’s favourite liquor-based cereal treat, Count Vodkula.” Mixing up Khrushchev’s Soviet Russia with Dracula’s Romania is the least of the film’s blunders as it hurls everything into the blender to buoy its level of deranged farce.
Unfrosted marks the directorial debut of Jerry Seinfeld, the much-garlanded comedian celebrated for his 1989-1998 sitcom Seinfeld, which ran for 180 episodes and starred the comic as a funnier version of himself. Here, besides directing, he also co-produces, co-writes (with three others) and plays Bob Cabana, head of development at Kellogg's (now Kellanova), straight man to a cast of apparent lunatics. Besides Melissa McCarthy, pretty much everybody aims their dialogue to the back of the gods, as if shouting were a form of comic endearment. The tone is in the Airplane!/The Naked Gun mode, but on a much broader scale, augmented by Christophe Beck’s excruciating score.
When the famously sugary tarts are first tested in a toaster, Cabana and Donna Stankowski, a Nasa food scientist (McCarthy), look on from a bunker of sandbags as taste pilot Steve Schwinn (Jack McBrayer), in a spacesuit, is blown to kingdom come. Everything is thrown into the mix, including a storming of Kellogg’s headquarters by “a violent mob of beloved mascots” led by Hugh Grant’s Tony the Tiger – complete with QAnon horns, fur and painted face, modelled on the January 6 incursion of the Capitol Building. The scene in which Hugh Grant and Melissa McCarthy trade insults marks a nadir in an otherwise respectable career for the English actor. He: “I like your hairdo. You look like a telephone.”
The film is truly unbearable and must be a new low for Netflix.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Jerry Seinfeld, Melissa McCarthy, Jim Gaffigan, Max Greenfield, Hugh Grant, Amy Schumer, Peter Dinklage, Christian Slater, Bill Burr, Dan Levy, James Marsden, Jack McBrayer, Thomas Lennon, Bobby Moynihan, Adrian Martinez, Sarah Cooper, Mikey Day, Kyle Mooney, Drew Tarver, Tony Hale, Maria Bakalova, Dean Norris, Kyle Dunnigan, Sebastian Maniscalco, Cedric the Entertainer, Fred Armisen, John Slattery, Jon Hamm, Eleanor Sweeney, Bailey Sheetz, Isaac Bae, Jessica Seinfeld.
Dir Jerry Seinfeld, Pro Jerry Seinfeld, Spike Feresten and Beau Bauman, Screenplay Jerry Seinfeld, Spike Feresten, Andy Robin and Barry Marder, Ph William Pope, Pro Des Clayton Hartley, Ed Evan Henke, Music Christophe Beck, Costumes Susan Matheson.
Columbus 81 Productions/Skyview Entertainment/Good One Productions-Netflix.
96 mins. USA. 2024. UK and US Rel: 3 May 2024. Cert. 12.
