The Bucket List: Going in style

The Bucket List (2007) • View trailer
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.11.08

Some films are bulletproof: They'll live or die solely in the court of popular opinion, regardless of critical commentary.

Carter Chambers (Morgan Freeman, right) isn't entirely happy about the first
adventure proposed by new best friend Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson), and his
nervous jitters increase as the drop zone approaches. But he'll soon find
tougher things to face: his own feelings about life and mortality.

The Bucket List is just such a picture: a sentimental and predictable script; a concept that explores wish fulfillment and roads not taken; and two veteran actors who could deliver these frequently amusing but not terribly substantial lines in their sleep.

What's not to like?

There's something undeniably engaging about watching a couple of old pros work such material ... and few could be better than Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.

Nicholson plays Edward Cole, a corporate raider maintaining his empire by gobbling up distressed hospitals and turning them into soulless, profit-driven businesses that regard patients as inconvenient, if not a downright nuisance. Edward is, as a result, precisely the sort of man who would benefit from a stinging come-uppance; he gets it when an unexpected cancer diagnosis shortens his life to a matter of months.

Edward also winds up in one of his own hospitals, where he's hoist by the petard of his own efficiency edicts: two patients per room, no exceptions. He thus winds up having his own private misery invaded by Carter Chambers (Freeman), a career car mechanic facing his own mortality, and for similar reasons.

The degree to which Justin Zackham's script has any actual juice occurs during these early scenes, before the two men thaw enough to reach out: Director Rob Reiner lets both get reasonably scruffy as they navigate the humiliating trauma of (for example) keeping each other up while wracked with bone-ratting chills from chemotherapy, or dashing for another round of vomiting in the shared bathroom, while trying not to be noticed by anybody else in the room.

Both men go into brief remission and wonder how to approach their final days. Edward, having grown to respect his new companion — actually "liking" each other will take a bit more time — embraces Carter's half-hearted scribblings on a sheet of yellow legal paper: a long-ago philosophy exercise designed to encourage people to imagine what they'd want to accomplish, if enabled to know when they'd die.

It's a "bucket list": things to do before kicking the bucket (a line Nicholson delivers with mordant relish).