Movie Review: The Bucket List

They ought to make a special lifetime achievement award for Morgan Freeman as Best Wise Mentor in the movies, as directors tap on him again and again to open and close their films with his narrations of witty and pithy maxims. Rob Reiner gets his chance now with The Bucket List, as Freeman’s narration talks about another man whom he says lived more wholly in the last few weeks of his life than in the rest of his days put together. When Jack Nicholson plays that other man, one wonders whether Freeman can tame a wild persona like Nicholson’s.

Putting two great veterans together like Nicholson and Freeman as two terminally ill cancer patients living their lives to the fullest may seem like a winning concept and is the main selling point of The Bucket List. The problem with Rob Reiner’s direction and Justin Zackham’s script is that they just trade in on the actors’ personas rather than rejuvenate them. We instinctively pay attention to two of the most watchable actors on the screen who do what they do best and are willing to look less than glamorous with shaved heads and surgery scars, but they and everyone involved here seems to be too laid back to add in some creative juice.

After the film's wise opening narration, we first see Freeman as auto mechanic Carter Chambers lighting a puffy cigarette - a bad news signal that is about as subtle as writing “lung cancer” in big letters on a chalkboard. When he is hospitalized, he ends up lying next to Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson), who also happens to be the hospital administrator. The cantankerous Cole is not exactly happy to have to abide by his own policy of placing two patients per room for comfort, which he previously strongly advocated in court before coughing up some blood and being diagnosed with cancer himself.

Carter is a history professor in spirit, if not in title, but gave up that dream up in order to fulfill his economic obligation of providing for his growing family. The man can answer every single question that comes up on Jeopardy, which Cole watches with amazement.

One day, Cole discovers him writing a bucket list, which Carter explains was an assignment from his old philosophy professor to write down the things one would like to do before he or she dies. Carter thinks it is silly at first, but upon Cole’s reinforcement, the two escape from the hospital to check off the items on the list. None of the activities listed—such as skydiving, racecar driving, and traveling on a private jet to such locales as The Pyramids of Giza and The Great Wall of China—are beyond their reach because Cole is a super-rich lothario who is not unlike Jack Nicholson himself.

Many people thought the trailer showed the great promise of having Nicholson and Freeman playing off each other like sandpaper. The disappointment is that the movie itself does not have a whole lot more abrasive humor to offer. There is not a much funnier dialogue, for example, in the skydiving scene when Nicholson says, “This is living,” and Freeman says, “I hate your rotten, stinking guts.” Both actors are comfortable in their respective thespian styles, but the screenplay offers very few surprises as the two men check off the list and once we realize the actors will behave exactly according to what they are best known for rather than playing a little more role reversal.

Article Author: moviejohn

Joo-Wang John Lee is a computer programmer at Dartmouth Medical School by day and a movie critic by hobby. Upon insistent suggestion from people around him, he finally decided to start critiquing movies in writing instead of just verbal form among his friends. …

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