I’ve been rewatching Seinfeld lately. A random, once every few years whim, in no way timed to the release of Jerry Seinfeld’s first feature directorial effort or his thousandth feature effort at being an out of touch, conservative billionaire. It’s still a great show, at least as a slap-bass tuned portrait of slacker ‘90s NYC that existed with the express purpose of being about nothing, and allowed for some of the finest sitcom character acting of all time from Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Everything about it is sort of accidentally perfect, something that could really never exist in the same form anywhere else. Insane characters who were outwardly awful people made disasters out of mundanity, their absurd fantasies a farcical edge to a recognizable world of everyday experiences. It’s also often a great ensemble in spite of Jerry himself, who can usually barely maintain a decent performance as the straight man. It’s all part of the show’s charm, but he’s a broad and occasionally funny comedian whose simple observational stylings lucked into a decade long hit sitcom that would also make him insufferably rich.

A great writer could take that kind of recipe for success and double down, find how to make the magic work in a new setting and update it for a new generation. It’s exactly what Larry David did with Curb Your Enthusiasm. Jerry Seinfeld might be the perfect everyman with the right style of comedy to create a loose narrative structure that allows for the existence of George Costanza, but he’s far from the show’s driving engine. While David created a whole new empire of television success, Seinfeld’s biggest swing was at a movie about a jazz-loving bee falling in love with a human woman, which to this day seems like a collective fever dream we’re yet to wake up from.

The first mistake of Unfrosted is that it is about something. Much like Bee Movie (2007), it’s a stilted high-concept fantasy where most of the film rests on the absurdity of its premise. A war between breakfast companies in a race to bring the first mass manufactured toaster strudel to market. It feels like it’s losing the second it hits the screen, dull narration slogging through exposition so it’s perfectly clear what the boundaries of the world’s absurdities are. It exists in a strange liminal space – what feels like it should be a genre parody in the vein of Walk Hard (2007) ends up feeling closer to thinly veiled corporate propaganda like last year’s Flamin’ Hot. There’s just nothing to get from it, because the design is so inscrutably incoherent. The companies are real, and the product is real – “unlicensed,” maybe, but this does a lot more for brand saturation and product integration than it does make any reasonable attempt at taking down these absurd corporate entities.

Believe it or not, this bizarre purgatory between feature length advertisement, off-key satire, and ensemble collection of every comedian of the last couple decades — plus Christian Slater — makes for a pretty befuddling, nonsense film. It never once makes any tangible argument for its own existence – like another fever dream gone haywire, it mostly feels like a passing joke turned into a feature film, like a coffee shop conversation between Jerry and George about a dream Jerry had where Tony the Tiger waged brutal war against Quaker Oats’ titular Quaker. Unfortunately, nobody is sitting across the table remarking on the blatant stupidity of the dream’s premise, and Cosmo Kramer isn’t about to interrupt the scene by flying into the café at mach speed.

In an almost dream-like way (notably not a compliment here where for most films a dreamy atmosphere and slippery reality is the stuff of magic), Unfrosted, above all else, cannot commit to any one idea. A vision board generated by a “there are no bad ideas” edict without any editorial examination to transform the raw ideas into something worthwhile, every scene is a new direction taking the shortest road possible to the next punchline. If only it were ever funny. A-list actors and comedians are haphazardly thrown into every scene with no attempt at any sort of comedic chemistry, personalities and styles clash and nobody is aiming at the same thing. Seinfeld and Jim Gaffigan have the film’s only convincing rapport because they actually share a comedic wavelength, but their characters are as compelling as sludgy paste. You could easily list off the individual performances of every notable actor and pinpoint exactly how antithetical to everyone else their thing is, but it really stops mattering once you settle in and realize that the film will never escape the simplistic boundaries of “we have a silly premise.”

Unfrosted isn’t one of the worst films of the year thus far because it’s horrendously unfunny, or because Jerry Seinfeld’s best attempt at edgy provocation in a world he’s deemed too woke for comedy is dressing Hugh Grant’s Tony the Tiger as the QAnon Shaman for a January 6^th bit in a movie that takes place in the 1960s. It’s one of the worst films of the year because Jerry Seinfeld hasn’t made a movie about nothing – he’s made a movie that is nothing.

2/10