Jerry Seinfeld debut as director, Unfrosted, is a limp vanity project

Jerry Seinfeld is making his directorial debut aged 70, but from his promotion of the film he doesn’t seem too confident about it. During one interview he proclaimed “the movie business is over”, while in another he said TV comedy had been killed by “the extreme left and PC crap”. Whether those are sincere concerns or clickbait soundbites, the sitcom legend made headlines and put his new project in the spotlight.

In their quest to make anything into content, Netflix greenlit an entire film based on a joke from his stand up routine about the creation of the Pop-Tart, and the absurdity of that idea. The essentially fictional film imagines a space race between Kellogg’s and Post (later known as General Foods) to create the true alternative to milk and cereal. Enlisting the help of a NASA scientist (Melissa McCarthy), they invent the titular frosted snack, but the race to the shelves of 1960s America is fraught. 

In truth, the film as much about the cereal industry as his stand-up bit is. Crammed full of household names, Jerry Seinfeld deliberately aims for something silly, a relative outlier in today’s climate of very serious streaming offerings. But silly doesn’t always mean funny, and alas Unfrosted is rarely that. 

It’s a ramble of a movie, going through various one-liners that either land or don’t or never connect in any meaningful way. Occasionally something works, such as the casting of Bill Burr as an outspoken President John F Kennedy, or Hugh Grant as a long-suffering Tony The Tiger.

If the mere sight of Jerry Seinfeld has you rolling on the floor, you may find something of value here, but on the whole Unfrosted feels like a lazy compilation reel. It’s the cinematic version of a Seinfeld bit: casual, trivial, and loose with the truth. It’s great in stand up, but stretched to a ninety-minute film it feels like a box of empty calories. The movie business isn’t “over” – but vanity projects like this don’t do it any favours.