.

I think the expectations were quite high for this as Jerry Seinfeld’s directorial debut. It is true that his greatest contribution to cinema so far is a cartoon about a sardonic insect but he is an incredibly successful stand up comic and the co-creator and star of one of America’s best loved sitcoms. Even Bee Movie had something smart to say about market forces, labour exploitation and environmentalism.

Going in then, with Seinfeld as the helm, this looked to be an intelligent satire on the recent Hollywood trend of making films about the origin of famous products. We’ve had Tetris, Air, Blackberry, The Bernie Bubble, that one about Flaming Hot Cheetos and even to some extent Barbie, and a film industry that has become so obsessed with brand recognition that it has started telling stories around non entertainment brands was going to get lampooned for its cowardly and safe sensibilities.

That is not what we’ve got with this comedy about the invention of the Pop Tart though. In the end Unfrosted is nothing more than a slightly random pastiche of 60s America that amounts to a hotchpotch of themed sketches with weak punchlines, and one that itself relies on easy familiarity – here with the cast and guest appearances, rather than having anything new, relevant or interesting to say.

I guess Seinfeld chose this for his first feature calling the shots because he looked at the finished script and his contacts list and thought ‘I might as well, this one isn’t going to be that hard!’.

To be fair, maybe part of the problem here is that I am not from the US. Certainly a lot of those cameo reveals will work better in the States; Bill Burr for example is not as well known on this side of the pond (despite a strong turn in The Mandalorian) so when the camera panned up to his face I felt nothing. Also, we didn’t even get Pop Tarts in the United Kingdom until the early 1990s so the time period is a little confusing. I literally had no understanding of the cultural significance of any of this and I still don’t.

This said our own Hugh Grant is a big, if slightly irrelevant, part of the film (although he is not as random an inclusion as the sentient ravioli). What they seem to have done here though is just ask the actor to reprise his role from Paddington 2 and in the same way as every film that has tried recapture the magic of Cary Elwes’ performance in The Princess Bride (Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Ella Enchanted, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre) they have failed.

Unfrosted is at best mildly amusing and at worst tedious. Some of the characters are based on real people too but no reverence is given to this whatsoever. I get the lampooning of JFK and Walter Kronkite but Jack LaLanne was an early advocate for personal health and Marjorie Post was a major philanthropist, finding healthcare and the arts. Here as played by James Masters and Amy Schumer they are presented as idiots and sociopaths in a way I’m sure they don’t deserve.

So despite the fanfare, I’m not sure Jerry Seinfeld should have bothered. I certainly wish I hadn’t.

I prefer yoghurt bars anyway.