The Bucket List
Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman
Warner Brothers
2007
It is easy to hate The Bucket List for a plethora of reasons from corny dialogues to clumsy direction and equally clumsy performances. Jack Nicholson (billionaire Edward Cole) and Morgan Freeman (Carter Chambers) are great actors trapped in a movie that could have been more if it were less predictable and less preachy.
Even a child will see the story line from practically the first scene of the movie. Two men dying of cancer decide to live out the rest of their life with a bang. A Bucket List is a simple idea: Create a list of things you want to accomplish before you die and then do them. It is a simple idea from a simplistic vision of life and a popular journalisms approach to selling magazines off the newsstands. What does this Bucket List have on it? Drive a Shelby, kiss the most beautiful girl in the world, visit the African savanna, visit the great pyramids, visit the Himalayas, visit Hong Kong – lots of visiting not much doing and this is part of the reason The Bucket List fails to engage beyond the superficial level. Going into an particular detail about the exact sequence of predictable events will only spoil what little there is in the way of story – they do stuff and disagree about stuff like grumpy old men.
This is not a bad movie it is simply not a good movie. The Bucket List is a ho hum Christmas offering from a director and actors whom we have come to expect more from. At the heart of it we should all be better people and live our lives with the intensity that Cole and Chambers try to capture in the twilight of their lives but this is not a good movie about how to live your life or about cancer. On the other hand it isn’t a bad way to kill a couple of dead holiday hours if you’ve got nothing better to do.
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