Jerry Seinfeld gets silly in ‘Unfrosted,’ a nostalgic comedy without much snap, crackle and pop

Review by Brian Lowry, CNN

(CNN) — Jerry Seinfeld waited this long for his directing debut, which makes the choice of “Unfrosted,” a silly lark of a comedy, somewhat perplexing. Far from a passion project, this Netflix film distinctly feels – as one of its writers says in the production notes – like a punchline in search of a movie, built on a soggy parade of sugary cameos that doesn’t provide much snap, crackle and pop.

Charitably, “Unfrosted” serves as a disjointed send-up of the 1960s, using a war between cereal companies – and the idea that for kids watching TV during those years, “Battle Creek, Michigan” seemed like a magical place – as its backbone. In that sense the ostensible plot, involving a race to develop what became the Pop-Tart, is really more a point of entry than a true recipe.

Sharing script credit with a trio of writers (two of them “Seinfeld” alums, as well as collaborators on the animated “Bee Movie”), Seinfeld more than anything seems to have wanted to make a modern-day Marx Brothers movie, where the gags fly fast and furious. That includes plenty of lines made funny by hindsight, like someone reading a newspaper in the early ‘60s and saying, “Vietnam, now that seems like a good idea.”

The problem is mastering that sort of tone is a lot harder than Groucho and company made it look. Sneaking in a bunch of old-movie references (“The Right Stuff” and “The Godfather” among them), or jokes about John F. Kennedy (Bill Burr) being a philanderer, might provoke a chuckle or two in Seinfeld’s demo, but the free-associating, madcap pacing feels like overkill in a way that gets old awfully fast.

A fictionalized story with a tiny grain of truth, “Unfrosted” focuses on Seinfeld’s Bob Cabana, an executive at Kellogg’s who is horrified to discover that rival Post, and its scheming chief executive Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer), might be on the verge of marketing a breakfast pastry that could revolutionize the business.

Determined to level the playing field, Bob enlists a former colleague (Melissa McCarthy) to join the effort to thwart Post, as the two embark on what amounts to a pop-culture tour of the 1960s.

While some of those digressions are clever, most come across as arbitrary and odd, veering off course to include gags about everything from the space program to fitness guru Jack LaLanne. Of all the casting surprises, one stands head and shoulders above the rest (you’ll know it when you see it), but that moment mainly highlights what “Unfrosted” could have been had the movie been able to sustain that.

While it’s possible to get into the nostalgic spirit, the question Seinfeld doesn’t bother trying to address is “Why?,” or at least, why now? Perhaps curiosity about the whole directing thing simply got the better of him, but it’s a self-indulgent exercise, informed by a sense that Netflix would have said “yes” to anything he pitched them. (Seinfeld does include one sweet wrinkle, naming a character “Rick Ludwin” after the late NBC executive who ordered “Seinfeld.”)

In promoting the film, Seinfeld recently lamented the current state of TV comedy, so it’s not surprising he’d be drawn to the past. Still, while “Unfrosted” isn’t wholly unfunny (or at least, not consistently so) it is, more than anything, just plain unnecessary.

“Unfrosted” premieres May 3 on Netflix.

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