Movie Review: The Bucket List - Page 2

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.

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.

Article Author: moviejohn

Joo-Wang John Lee is a computer programmer at Binghamton University 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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