Call it grumpy old dead men. The Bucket List stars Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as terminally ill cancer patients who itemize all the things they want to do before they die.
Like any diagnosis, things here can go one of two ways and -- considering the presence of its acting titans -- it's not a stretch to hope the film would traffic in truth, profundity or the slightest ounce of soulfulness.
No such luck.
Instead, The Bucket List displays all the emotional heft of two septuagenarians bickering over what to buy for groceries.
It blathers when it should be silent, jokes when it should be sad, revels when it should ruminate.
For that, blame meathead Rob Reiner, who hasn't directed a good film since Cheers was on the air. His streak remains unbroken.
Freeman plays Carter Chambers, an auto mechanic with more than a few misgivings about his life who is forced to share a hospital room with self-absorbed billionaire Edward Cole (Nicholson).
Shouldn't Cole -- given his wealth and the American two-tier health care system -- be able to scrounge up better digs, you ask? In fact, Edward owns the hospital.
But because his professional mantra has always been, "Two beds to a room -- no exceptions," he swallows his pride and personal comfort in the name of good PR.
Despite their differences, the two mismatched roomies bond over chemotherapy, late-night retch-fests and the prospect of The End. Eventually they are each given roughly a year to live. Regrets abound. Carter, an ace at Jeopardy, wanted to be a professor, but took the first job that came along when his wife got pregnant. By contrast, Edward has lived a glamorous, powerful, materialistic life at the expense of a family.
All of this comes into play later on, but first Reiner -- desperate to keep the tone upbeat -- stacks Carter and Edward's bucket list with nonsense like skydiving and racecar driving.
Reiner's vision of mortality is as genial as a sitcom, a last gasp accompanied by a laugh track -- so desperate to avoid making audiences squirm that it sidesteps the grimness of death altogether. How else to explain why Nicholson, supposedly ravaged by cancer, nonetheless never sheds a pound?
Just as conveniently, because Edward is rich, nothing is out of their reach -- not the South of France, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal or even the Himalayas.
Throughout, Nicholson and Freeman are content to riff on variations of their all-but-patented personas: Freeman the wise, measured voice of reason; Nicholson the gruff but big-hearted devil -- the rascal incarnate.
As a result, even their deaths never quite register as deeply as they should. It's just Jack and Morgan, after all. They've gone on to better scripts.
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