Bruce Willis and Nick Nolte in Alan Rudolph's Breakfast of Champions

There are a few things you can always count on. Death, taxes, and that Alan Rudolph will make a bad movie.

Breakfast of Champions was a bad idea from the get go. A wildly original literary experiment, no matter how beloved by post-grads, does not ipso facto lend itself to film adaptation. This is why Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (another book associated with cartoon doodles) and Catch-22 gave audiences a headache. It's why White Noise and On The Road should never be filmed.

At face value, Breakfast of Champions is true to Kurt Vonnegut's novel. It is about the absurdities of our near-religious dependence on the consumer culture in America's heartland. The Hawaiian muzak and advertising images float on the screen as real as any character. Words literally fly out of the radio and rattle in people's brains. But one of the main points of the book, the meta-textual conflict between Vonnegut and his characters, has been shelved.

Bruce Willis plays the used car salesman cracking up. Nick Nolte plays his closeted transvestite employee. They run around and rave like they're losing their minds and it makes for boring cinema. And the camera jerks around like a rap video.

There are a good number of great actors involved in this film, like Omar Epps, Buck Henry, Lukas Haas, Owen Wilson and Albert Finney as the sloppy science fiction writer Kilgore Trout. It's kind of a shame they had no interesting lines to speak. It is fun to see Finney mumble and mutter pap-philosophy, but when the movie starts taking him and it seriously, it's time to check out. Luckily there is a swell opportunity to see the sufficiently zaftig Glenne Headly strut around in some form-fitting underwear. Her sex scene with Bruce Willis is one of the only notable things about the movie, but that may've just been because of her luscious bust. And some of Martin Denny's music is fun. But "Bunny" at the Apocalyptic-Best Western off the interstate was much better in my head when I read Vonnegut in 8th grade.

Breakfast of Champions sucked. I'm not going to bother to think about it anymore, and you shouldn't waste your time seeing it, let alone reading about it.