The predictability pervades to the ways that Cole's and Carter's lives seek to resolve themselves before they die. Cole had married four times and turns out to have a long-lost daughter he is not on good terms with, but again, if you have seen the trailer, you have seen the resolution already, as the movie just cuts to a montage without any real dialogue or simmering conflict between the two (which is made even more derivative because Nicholson played a far richer character of this sort in About Schmidt).

The whole movie progresses like this during the men's globetrotting adventures where we see each man sharing an unresolved part of his life and then refusing to follow up on it, but end up acting on it anyway upon the other's coaxing. That Carter's rocky relationship with his loyal wife, Virginia (Beverly Todd), has some more feeling despite the trappings is more of a tribute to Todd, who really grows to be the most compelling, probably because her lacking the star power of her fellow actors allows her to make much more of what could have been a shrill wife character who wants her man to come home and spend his last few months with his family.

I hate to knock on a movie that tries to earnestly deal with issues of life and death and I have nothing against a more optimistic, feel-good treatment of the material, but the screenplay by Zackham just seems to have been written after jotting down notes from repeated viewings of Nicholson's and Freeman's greatest hits and does not make the characters' lives unpredictable enough to feel more real and less soapy.

That certainly does not help director Rob Reiner, who has failed to capture in recent years the real comical spin and zing he brought to his past films like This is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride, and The American President, though this one is certainly better than his last few clunkers like The Story of Us, Alex and Emma and Rumor Has It.

It's a missed opportunity, as what could have been a deep reflection and meditation on life is just condensed to watching something of an actors' retrospective, which you might have guessed from the fact that I've mentioned their names so many times. I am not without high regards for the two actors, even if I felt I was watching them more than caring about their characters' ultimate fates, and no one dispenses fortune cookie advice such as "Find the joy in your life" more persuasively and charismatically than Freeman. When he later gets his lifetime achievement Oscar®, he could just a pick a clip of one of his past movie narrations instead of writing his own acceptance speech.

Bottom line: Close but no cigar.