To get straight to the point, The Bucket List offers nothing more than it advertises: two cancer-stricken old men living it up while learning life lessons about existence and friendship before they die.
On paper, this film has everything working against it. The story progression seems a little trite. The main characters are perfect archetypal foils. The plot is mostly predictable, complete with emotional fallouts and requisite tear-jerking reunions. Under lesser actors, it could’ve easily ended up as the crowning achievement of a talent-less straight-to-DVD auteur. OK, maybe that’s a little harsh. The point is, the film is exactly what it claims to be–there aren’t really any surprises.
But for some reason, that doesn’t seem to matter much. The Bucket List actually ends up better than the sum of its parts, courtesy of the entertaining performances by Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman–though it’s no comedic The Shawshank Redemption or A Few Good Men, it mostly works.
The story goes something like this: After coughing up blood at a company board meeting, Edward Cole (Nicholson), a sarcastic, out-of-touch moneybags, ends up bunking against his will in his own hospital with dry, bookish Carter Chambers (Freeman), a similarly afflicted working-class family man with a penchant for Jeopardy.
It’s during their stay in the hospital that the titular “bucket list” makes its debut. Compiled by Cole and Chambers, the list contains all the things the two men want to do before their imminent deaths. Out of the hospital, comedic adventures ensue, as the two geriatrics jump out of airplanes, race old muscle cars and visit expectedly exotic locations.
Freeman and Nicholson are fun to watch, even though the film is less about humor and more about “dramedy”–though that’s somewhat expected coming from director Rob Reiner (though if When Harry Met Sally is anything to go on, he’s better with romantic comedies). The laughs that are present are either situational or subtle, and mostly there isn’t anything past a chuckle, but it doesn’t really detract from the film as a whole.
Even when the plot starts to go emotionally south in the last third, things aren’t so bad. Sentimentality is always a tricky thing to pull off effectively, but even in its midst, Cole and Chambers are still flawed and likeable characters.
It may not offer anything particularly new or different to the genre, but if you want to leave the theater feeling warm and fuzzy, The Bucket List serves its purpose just fine.