Therefore far, Hollywood’s fascination with portraying the invention of certain goods has relied on illustrating the seriousness of the eventual presence of those goods: Nike’s Air Jordans in Air, the dawn of the smartphone in BlackBerry, Tetris in (that’s right) Tetris. Jerry Seinfeld’s Unfrosted Pop-Tarts movie is silly in an inverse way. It is very dumb on purpose — a heightened send-up of these tropes that gives world-changing importance to the creation of a fruit-goo-filled rectangle. For kids, according to Unfrosted, the arrival of the Pop-Tart was the biggest cultural event of the ’60s, Seinfeld himself was one such child.
So his feature directorial debut is a madcap retro romp through a cereal civil war, candy-colored and Jolly Rancher-flavored, as Kellogg’s and Post go head-to-head for breakfast pastry supremacy. There’s a kernel of truth there — they really did sue each other over Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts and Post’s Country Squares — but Seinfeld abandons facts for high-fructose-syrup screwballery. The bare-bones plot leaves room for an all-star cast to rotate through cameos like it’s an old-timey variety show: The brightest minds in food gather to dream impossible amid a deeply unserious world of milkman syndicates and sugar cartels, with Death Flagging Computers™️ around every corner and at least one subplot concerning a sentient ravioli being created. Picture Oppenheimer dressed as Ron Burgundy; you get it.
That anything-goes-ness takes shape as a Space Race–style series of experiments and test-launches — mileage may vary on whether they’re breezy fun or grating zaniness — but while they are scattershot gags, they’re frequent ones. This is set up as more joke machine than movie, playing closer to a sketch revue than a traditional narrative feature, with Seinfeld leaning into his usual gregariousness and McCarthy bringing sparky energy as brainbox “Stan” while Hugh Grant plays a lesser version of his Paddington 2 icon Phoenix Buchanan in the role of Shakespearean actor-turned-Tony The Tiger Thurl Ravenscroft and Jon Hamm makes a genius cameo that we won’t spoil. Will anybody be able to keep up? Probably not; as the computer says: You’re all gonna die.
But whether or not they land, it’s Seinfeld’s sincerity that keeps Unfrosted just about coherent — love not just for Pop-Tarts themselves but what they meant to kids like him. So this isn’t even only a Pop-Tart movie; it’s a movie Pop-Tart: No nutritional value, but sweet and warm right down to the last bite.
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