‘Unfrosted’ Netflix Movie Review - Jerry Seinfeld Tests Jokes on the Audience

A kid walks into a bar and orders a man to be quick with his story, the "In memoriam" section at the Bowl and Spoon Awards contains the image of a box named Grandma's Holes, and President John F. Kennedy (Bill Burr) uses his Ask Not words too literally. These three jokes in Jerry Seinfeld's Unfrosted work successfully. Then there are jokes, like the one where Bob's (Seinfeld) towel flies in the air and lands on his wife's face, that make you chuckle because you notice their desperation to tickle the audience's funny bone. The remaining gags, on the other hand, land with a thud. These include janitors spying with a camera attached to their mops, a computer (UNIVAC) being hired as one of the taste pilots, Bob "walking the aisle," and the presence of a mutant pasta creature. The third type of joke in Unfrosted belongs to the "look, I am funny" category. Meaning: Jokes that scream, "Laugh! We are amusing!" These include lines involving the loss of 25 pounds of fat, a remark about a funny mix-up with Chuck (Ronny Chieng), and the testing of a new product in a NASA-like atmosphere. These moments, too, fail to generate chuckles.

Given all these varieties of humor in Unfrosted, it feels as if you are watching a comedian testing his jokes on the audience. Seinfeld would have mostly found dead stares if this were a live show. The movie was written by four people (Seinfeld, Spike Feresten, Andy Robin, and Barry Marder), but the screenplay could have very well been generated by a machine like UNIVAC. What is it about? Kellogg's vs Post - the fight to create the best breakfast pastry. If Unfrosted were a breakfast pastry, it would have been pretty bland and unhealthy.

The Netflix synopsis goes like this: Jerry Seinfeld turns his lifelong love of the pop tart into this deliciously fictional comedy about the heated war to invent the iconic breakfast pastry. Firstly, there is nothing delicious, funny, or intense about the war depicted in the film. Second, Seinfeld's love for the Pop-Tart gives rise to something empty and unexciting. The 70-year-old stand-up comedian has not written enough good jokes for this project. As a filmmaker, he throws every idea, every remark - no matter how stupid - on the wall and moves the machine with a pace so quick that everything becomes a blur - nothing sticks.

"Such a hard job, making people laugh," says a character at one point. Unfrosted, for 96 minutes, proves this statement right. Without a committed cast ranging from Melissa McCarthy to Peter Dinklage, Unfrosted would have been an enormous blah. Still, this is pretty much a soulless affair - it leaves you feeling meh. Seinfeld should have kept his lifelong love of the Pop-Tart to himself. His cinematic vision is devoid of style as well as substance.

Final Score- [3/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times