# Breakfast of Champions (1999)

### reviewed by
Allan Jenoff

Breakfast of Champions Directed by: Alan Rudolph Starring: Bruce Willis, Albert Finney, Nick Nolte, Vicki Lewis, Barbara Hershey, Glenne Headly, Lukas Haas, Omar Epps, Buck Henry, Ken Campbell, Jake Johannsen Running time: 110 minutes My rating (5 star scale): ****

This film is based on the novel by Kurt Vonnegut. Since Vonnegut's novels don't have straightforward plots or easy to understand characters, the movies made from them are complicated and not exactly mainstream. Which makes the appearance of so many big stars in this film very surprising.

Fresh from his success in The Sixth Sense, a film in which he rarely spoke above a whisper and had no action scenes, Willis comes to a film where he is often shouting and engages in a lot of action. But it still isn't a typical Willis movie. There are no terrorists, no bombs, no bad guys. Instead, we have a town full of people who are going mad. Some have already gone there. Dwayne Hoover (Willis) is a successful car dealer whose family life is a shambles. His wife is clearly ill and popping pills. His son goes by the name of Bunny and was a big disappointment at military school. His mistress is more interested in getting a chicken franchise than having sex. His sales manager (Nolte) is a secret cross dresser. And coming to see them is Kilgore Trout, hack writer deemed genius by Elliot Rosewater.

The movie follows Hoover's search for the meaning life. A question he hopes Trout can answer. It does a good job of emulating the inchoate style of Vonnegut's books. Willis and Nolte do a great job of portraying their psychologically damaged characters. And Albert Finney is exactly what I imagined Kilgore Trout to be.

I've seen some negative reviews of this movie and I think it is one you will either love or hate. I've also seen some people claim it is a ripoff of Brazil. You can only reach that conclusion if you have never seen a movie other than Brazil.

    --
    Allan Jenoff
    Check out my web page at http://www.interlog.com/~jenoff/

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews