Movie review: 'Unfrosted' substitutes insufferable silliness for history

LOS ANGELES, May 2 (UPI) -- Films about the creation of Flamin' Hot Cheetos, the game Tetris, the Blackberry phone and Nike Air Jordans showed how dramatic the stories behind products can be. Unfrosted, on Netflix on Friday, trades the true story of Pop-Tarts for bad jokes.

In 1963 Battle Creek, Mich., Bob Cabana (Jerry Seinfeld) works for Kellogg's, trying to keep ahead of Post. Both cereal companies will eventually develop a toaster-friendly pastry.

Director Seinfeld, with a script by himself with Andy Robin and Seinfeld writer Spike Ferensten, gets off to a promising start with Bob whimsically telling the tale to a runaway child in a diner. Unfrosted gets dire as soon as it flashes back, though.

Bob and Edsel Kellogg III (Jim Gaffigan) discuss kids spelling dirty words with Alpha-Bits cereal and take it too seriously. Kellogg's dominates the Box and Spoon Awards, as if cereal has its own prestigious event like the Oscars.

A slew of fake, failed Kellogg products are obviously gross and nothing a food company would ever develop. Bob assembles "taste pilots" of other famous brands, including Chef Boyardee (Bobby Moynihan) himself.

A cartoony score accompanies all of this, as if it's not ridiculous enough without music reminding the audience how goofy it is.

This is not Seinfeld's style. Why wouldn't he do his trademark observational comedy about the development of Pop-Tarts?

Not that creatives need to stay in their lane, but after decades of success on stage and television, he chose 2024 to try being wacky. There are still rules to wacky comedy and Unfrosted breaks them at its own risk.

Kellogg suggests the Vietnam War sounds like a good idea and later describes an automobile airbag as impossible. That's only funny if they play it straight.

This is more than winking. They're purposely being anachronistic.

Unfrosted also fakes the history of milk to make milkmen a sort of mafia. A milkman mafia is not funny enough to substitute for the true story of Pop-Tarts.

By the time competitors at Post pitch their products to Russian Premier Nikita Kruschev (Dean Norris), Unfrosted is so stupid. Meanwhile, Kellogg's literally asks John F. Kennedy (Bill Burr) how the country can help them.

Simply doing the opposite of JFK's "Ask not what your country can do for you"speech is not funny. The very idea that JFK got involved in cereal wars is too silly to actually be funny.

Unfrosted tries to turn the true story into a live-action cartoon, but does not seem to understand what makes cartoons funny, either. There are live-action movies that employ this tone effectively.

Last summer's Barbie defied logic, but had a point. The Naked Gun movies play all the absurdity straight.

Ace Ventura and Austin Powers accept their wacky characters as logical realities. Indie movies like Black Dynamite spoof their genre and manage to incorporate historic presidents as villains that fit the tones they've established.

Unfrosted has one inspired moment referencing a fictional TV drama set in the '60s. That involves enough layers of fiction to be funny.

Likewise, a spoof of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection at a cereal company could work, but the film has not earned it by the time it portrays that.

When several movies have shown true stories can be more compelling and funnier than making it up, Unfrosted is just baffling. These comedy legends and pop culture scholars shouldn't have tried to top reality.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.