As of late, Seinfeld has been on the living room television more times than I would like to care about. Just a random urge that visits me every few years, and I could not have been more off in predicting that Jerry Seinfeld would be releasing his first feature this year or his millionth attempt at being a wealthy ‘don’t know the times’ type of man. What a great show, at least as a slap-bass tuned portrait of slacker ‘90s NYC which was about nothing and allowed for some of the finest sitcom character acting of all time from Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. There’s an art to everything that seems to defy the imagination and that is something that is custom made anywhere in the world. Disasters created by insane characters who drove their absurd fantasies and surreal world made the most mundane hittable times into enjoyable moments. It’s also a decent ensemble most of the time despite Jerry, who can’t act anymore than a boring person who plays the straight man. All his stuff is very funny and entertaining, but he’s best as the bulldog of dumbkitschy observational comedy who somewhat accidentally landed a hit sitcom that made him a boatload of money.
Good writers know when to take a good thing and run with it; they find new places where something has worked before and how to bring it back to life for a new audience. That is precisely what Larry David did with Curb Your Enthusiasm. Jerry Seinfeld is not only an ideal everyman to pose as an interesting style to be the loose story, enough for George Costanza’s character to exist in, but certainly, not the main attraction of the sitcom. Seinfeld wanted to pursue writing more mainstream films, which is a jazz bee falling for a woman, he thought, and still believes, would be a huge hit, let alone that entire scenario is insane.
The first blunder of Unfrosted is that it is about something at all, which is unfortunate. Just like with the Bee Movie (2007), this is another film that isn’t really able to shy away from the core of its story because it is so unbelievable. This is a movie that discusses a war between breakfast table companies on who would manage to mass produce the toaster strudel first. It seems as though before the audience gets even the chance to see it, it’s already film as dull narration goes straight to telling the much needed story plot in order to inform the audience what the limits of the movies world are supposed to be. It sits somewhere in a very funny gray area. What comes in mind is that there should be some mocking parodies of games in the style of Walk Hard (2007), while in reality it looks more like a slightly modified advertisement of Flamin’ Hot that was released last year. The source material is simply not dependable since it is so outlandishly uncoordinated. These are not fictional companies, and there was an actual product–“unpatented,” sure, but it does much closer to creating an advertisement that inundates the market than it does actually attempting to poke fun of these laughable businesses.
Strange as it may seem, this disturbing void between being a feature length commercial, a very bad political parody, and having every popular comedian of the last twenty years (and Christian Slater) in one movie is quite an interesting mixture and yes, a nonsensical film. At no point does it provide a coherent rationale as to why it should be watched and is one of those crazy dreams which went terribly wrong: it seems to be a long running joke, like a poorly animated interlude from a coffeehouse chat between Jerry and George featuring a Tigers vs. Quakers Clash of the Titans with Tony the Tiger leading the charge. The only thing different is that no one is sitting opposite of the lunacy and there is no Cosmo Kramer to fly through the other end of the scene to save the day.
The director did not know completely in which style Unfrosted needed to be made. In considering this project, it seems that there was no agreement about who the target audience was and what was the main idea of the film. Scenes appear to have been made one after the other with no explanation given as to how they connected. Each novel approach ends at a joke that is practically never funny to begin with.
With no regard for the actors’ “chemistry” or the overall mood of the piece, they shoved Seinfeld and a bunch of other talented actors into random exchanges and different styles. Seinfeld and Jim Gaffigan were the only actors on the same wavelength, but their performance was boring. It is pathetic to behold a comedian with an identity crisis; only a few clearly standout actors present any energy in their performances, but by the time you sit down, it’s apparent that the film will stay within the scope of ‘a haphazard premise.’
On no account is Unfrosted one of the worst films in 2022 simply because Jerry Seinfeld for example, does not try to be shocking. And it is not because he dons a big cat costume as a for a film that is supposed to be set in the 60s.
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