The Bucket List film review

certificate_12A

THE BUCKET LIST

A comedy about two dying cancer patients is an unpromising premise, but then you add the names Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman and suddenly the idea is more appealing. The resulting The Bucket List ends up falling somewhere between the two expectations: being neither particularly good, but salvaged by watching two seasoned pros sparring joyfully with each other.

A geriatric buddy movie, The Bucket List is akin to Grumpy Old Men, though its protagonists are slightly less cantankerous. Director Rob Reiner has a propensity for sentimentality that all too often bathes his films in a saccharine sheen. It's this layer that shrouds a work that would have benefited from a little more poignancy and a lot more realism. Though both men are supposedly terminally ill, there is scant evidence of this save for Nicholson having his head shaved for surgery. It all too often feels like a manipulative ploy to illicit sympathy rather than a resonant cause for reflection.

There is certainly little apparently wrong with the two men as they travel the world ticking items off their list of things to do before they both kick the bucket. Given that one of them, Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson), is a billionaire, there is little that either man can list that isn't possible. It's a convenient way of placing both men in a multitude of exotic locations, even if the evidence suggests that both never actually went anywhere other than a Hollywood sound stage.

The pair has experienced very different lives. Business mogul Cole has enjoyed the wild life and been married four times while Carter Chambers (Morgan Freeman) was forced to abandon his dream of becoming a history professor and settle for being a car mechanic in order to provide for his family. They meet when both share a room at Cole's hospital, one that Cole has championed as being equal for all, hence having to share. While Cole is waited on by his long-suffering assistant (Sean Hayes), Carter begins scribbling down his wish list. When Cole finds it, he turns it from a wish to a reality, much to the infuriation of Carter's wife (Beverly Todd), as they embark on a trip that includes the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China and the Himalayas, not to mentions a spot of motor racing and sky-diving.