Unfrosted: even Hugh Grant can’t save Jerry Seinfeld’s stale Pop Tarts biopic
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Unfrosted – the barely-true-at-all “true story” of the Pop-Tart – is where frivolous brand biopics go to die. Stuffed to the gills with star cameos under the reigning guidance of Jerry Seinfeld, this would-be-farcical dive into the competitive fray of breakfast cereals has a pushiness born of almost zero inspiration.
Before it became feature-length landfill, the origin story of this toaster snack, cooked up by Kellogg’s at their Michigan HQ in 1964, was a popular bit in Seinfeld’s stand-up routines. How a zany extrapolation from this pub-trivia material has landed before us as a garish Netflix boondoggle is down to the great residual love for the comedian over in the US.
Watching it is like being trapped in a writers’ room full of stale air, where the brief is to deliver 90 minutes’ worth of funny material about the 1960s, and the clock is ticking. At minute 12, Walter Cronkite comes on screen for the first of several “it’s the 1960s!” appearances in black-and-white. When we reach minute 25 and not one joke has sparkled, you dream of escape.
Seinfeld both directs and stars as fictitious Kellogg’s suit Bob Cabana, who finds himself in the cereal equivalent of a space race against rival company Post, also based (weirdly) out of Battle Creek, and fronted by Amy Schumer in florid twin-sets as the real-life businesswoman Marjorie Post. Both firms came up with toastable pastries around the same time; who wins is just a matter of speed and marketing, and the fact that Post went and called their product “Country Squares”.
This is the entire plot; the rest is a bowl of sawdust. Melissa McCarthy injects what vim she can as a NASA scientist hired by Edsel Kellogg III (Jim Gaffigan) to be the genius of the operation, in turn lining up a quintet of eccentric boffins, all a waste of space, to brainstorm. Peter Dinklage is some kind of menacing dairy magnate in an off-white suit, and Christian Slater’s a sinister milkman – the clanking idea being that Pop-Tarts pose a threat to their very existence.
Even Hugh Grant comes unstuck. This weary rinse/repeat of his Paddington 2 turn might mean calling time sharpish on the panto-villain phase we’ve lately been enjoying. Yes, he’s a dastardly Shakespearian actor – “Thurl Ravenscroft” – who’s been pocketing cheques by voicing Tony the Tiger, and leads an uprising among the other aggrieved Kellogg’s mascots.
Inexplicably, their riot is styled like the Jan 6 storming of the Capitol, seemingly because someone thought that might be a goofy idea, twinned with the assumption that stuffing Grant into literally any silly costume (Viking horns, tooth necklace) will yield comic gold.
A side-trip to Puerto Rico finds a sugar boss living it up like a trigger-happy drug baron; a jaunt to Russia checks us in with Khrushchev for no particular reason. Bill Burr doesn’t do a bad JFK impression, but his material – darn, that Monroe girl has got him in trouble this time! – is as feeble as anyone’s.
Walter Cronkite looks as bored as we are, and equally confused by why he’s getting so much screen time. Seinfeld’s affable mugging is no compensation for putting us through a glorified pitch session anyone sane would have nipped in the bud.
12A cert, 93 min. On Netflix now
