Pepsi, Where's My Jet?

Pepsi, Where’s My Jet? doesn’t even try to take itself seriously, making for a fun look at how the little guy tried to call a big corporation on its mistakes. We don’t imagine they got away with it, but we’re looking forward to the journey they took to get to that point.

The entertaining, four-part Netflix mini-series “Pepsi, Where’s My Jet?” not only playfully unpacks the details of what went wrong but digs deeper to get at the core of why false advertising matters.

Director Andrew Renzi (“The Curse of Von Dutch: A Brand to Die For”) captures the zeitgeist of 1990s pop culture while treating this material like a non-fiction Adam McKay film, filled with popping visuals, colorful real-life characters and solidly researched intel.

As television, it’s absolute gubbins – and very gentle documentary-making indeed. A David and Goliath case in which Goliath has just as reasonable an argument as David and the moral stakes are so low as to be negligible is not the stuff of legend, even if it is of case law. But if you’re up for the viewing equivalent of a can of sweet fizz and empty calories, this will slip down just fine.

Unfortunately, the series is undone by both Leonard’s inability to justify his quest as reasonable, and the director’s failure to cast that mission as emblematic of some larger, worthwhile cause. ... Leonard and Hoffman’s anti-corporate sentiment—and specific desire to stick it to Pepsi—rings hollow. ... A few minor instances of comical outrageousness notwithstanding, the series is just empty calories.