A Bullet for Breakfast is a short film now available to view on YouTube from writer and director Wade Hampton about... well I’m not quite sure, to be honest. There are several masked murderers, a woman named Miss Brickle that seems to have magical powers, and a vague plot revolving around various characters all trying to get to some mcguffin but we aren’t given much more than that. The whole time I was watching this I couldn’t help but feel like I had missed something like this is a piece of a larger story or the latest in a series. There’s something to be said about world-building and not spoon-feeding your audience, but then there’s just throwing them into the deep end and hoping they can swim. The audience isn’t really given a sense of the rules of this world nor what this thing is that every character is after. While typically “less is more” is a good way to go, we still need to know what the object that everyone is after means to the characters what the stakes are if it falls into the wrong hands. A good lesson in this is Pulp Fiction, where we never see what’s in the briefcase, but we see the glow coming from it and the way every character’s jaw drops when they look inside tells us that it’s something valuable.
While the world-building and story of A Bullet for Breakfast leave a lot to be desired, the characters are all fun and fresh. Often times in short films it’s hard to make characters stand out since you only have a limited amount of time to get your story across, but this film manages to balance multiple characters across the 18-minute run-time and make them all pop. A drawback of this is that though these characters all have plenty of personality, they lack motivation and we never really know why they’re doing what they’re doing throughout the film. The dialogue is also particularly strong and elicits some good chuckles throughout, but a rookie mistake that many young filmmakers make is lingering on the witty banter a little too long, and A Bullet for Breakfast is very guilty of that. Tonal shifts are another tightrope walk for any film, but that’s another thing this movie does well, as it goes
from nightmarish visuals, surreal comedy, and gruesome violence all at the drop of a hat. The combination of unique characters and strange visuals but lack of stakes and story does give this film a very dream-like feel, making it feel like a love-child of David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino.
There’s some impressive craft on display in A Bullet for Breakfast though it lacks in the story department. It feels like it fits the definition of “raw talent” where the filmmakers aren’t quite refined just yet but are well on their way. It’s a quick, easy watch and will definitely leave you with more questions than answers, but you can’t help but feel like there’s potential in this world and in this filmmaker, and I for one am certainly curious to see what’s next.
James Reinhardt