Reiner's 'Bucket List' is Terminally Ill Emotionally

by Brett Parker

Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman have never acted together in a feature film and now they find themselves starring together in the Rob Reiner comedy, The Bucket List. This film provides the stars with the rather difficult task of distracting an audience from a film that lacks considerable realism, wit, logic, and good special effects. It’s a testament to both actors’ talents, I think, that in spite of the films many flaws, The Bucket List still comes across as entertaining and amusing.

Nicholson and Freeman both star as terminal cancer patients with only months to live. Nicholson is Edward Cole, a medical billionaire who owns the very hospital he is being cared for in, while Freeman is Carter Chambers, a mechanic with a loving extended family who wishes him well everyday at the hospital. Both Edward and Carter share a hospital room and despite their differences, they develop a friendship based mostly on their empathy for each other’s illness. One day, Edward notices Carter scribbling away at notepad and discovers he is making a “bucket list,” a list of all the things Carter wants to do with his life before he “kicks the bucket.”Being a billionaire with no close relatives, Edward realizes he can finance Carter’s bucket list dreams with money that will just go to waste anyways. Cringing at the thought of spending their remaining days in a hospital, Edward and Carter decide to up and travel around the world, fulfilling their wishes on the list. These wishes include skydiving, dining in France, seeing the Pyramids, etc. Edward and Carter have an exhilarating time and really grow close with each other. However, when Carter’s family begs him to come home and secrets are revealed about Edward’s own family history, the two realize that staring down death is more complicated than they thought.

The Bucket List is like eating a really tasty candy bar that you know is really bad for you health-wise. At face value, it’s an enjoyable film. Entertainment-wise, you can do a whole lot worse than watching Nicholson and Freeman living it up all over the world. Yet when you apply logical thought to the finer points of the script, you realize there is a whole lot wrong with this picture. If two men were really dying of cancer, would they really have enough energy to go running around the globe and jump out of airplanes like they do? Would Carter’s wife (Beverly Todd) really be as patient as she is about her husband wanting to spend his remaining days with a wild billionaire instead of with his own family? And this may be a small detail, but would a lifelong mechanic work on a car’s engine while smoking a cigarette? If that thing drops, it could send the fuel line up in flames!

One can usually be forgiving of a flawed screenplay if other parts of the film are of better quality, but The Bucket List shows weakness elsewhere outside of the script. Throughout the film, Edward and Carter visit exotic locations around the globe such as the Taj Mahal, Africa, and Hong Kong. Instead of filming Nicholson and Freeman in these actual locations, the scenes instead take place on unconvincing made-up sets filled in with clunky CGI effects. So obvious are the effects here that you can almost swear to seeing the blue screen placed behind the actors. At first, I thought maybe the filmmakers were trying to brighten the locations up to make them look more sublime, kind of like the dream-like New York City from Vanilla Sky, but who am I kidding? This was obviously done because the producers didn’t want to shell out the dough to send Nicholson and Freeman all over the world.

Also lacking is funny dialogue. You’d think Nicholson and Freeman talking about death and traveling would have you in stitches, but I found myself barely even chuckling throughout the viewing. I don’t know if the stars improvised at all, but they should’ve been given a lot more room for it than they were obviously given here.

Yet it is Nicholson and Freeman themselves who help to redeem this movie for its flaws. They allow certain complexities and details into their characters that give them more depth than is usually allowed in sappy dramadies. I mentioned Carter’s wife earlier. At first you ask yourself how a dying man could abandon his wife to go run off with a complete stranger. Carter tells us why, eventually, stating how his marriage wasn’t as fulfilling as he’d hoped it be. Some may find this to be a cruel and out-of-character, but it actually reveals a human honesty within the character that is a surprise to us. It is also revealed that Edward does not get along with his adult daughter. Instead of the usual father-daughter complications to explain the rift, we discover that his daughter had an abusive husband and Edward called a guy who “takes care of things” to take the husband out of the picture. The husband wasn’t killed, but he never came back. You have to admit this is dark stuff for this kind of entertainment, but that’s probably why it is so welcomed here. Nicholson and Freeman sell this as where lesser actors would fail miserably.

So what we have here is an amusing tearjerker filled with serious logical problems. But with Rob Reiner at the helm, how could we not see this coming? Reiner is a director who’s turned sacrificing logic in favor of sentiment into something of a director’s trademark. He’s had his hits (Stand by Me, A Few Good Men), he’s had his misses (The Story of Us, North) but for the most part, he’s dealt in emotionally-charged Hollywood fare that poses serious questions in terms of plot. I’m reminded of the time I saw Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds with a friend of mine. Most of the audience was furious with the bleak thriller’s rather happy ending. When I asked my friend about the ending, he stated “of course it was a happy ending. I knew that walking in. It’s Spielberg at the helm. Sometimes you have to know who you’re watching.”

That appears to be true of Reiner. If you pay to see one of his films and complain about too much sappiness and a lack of realism, perhaps it’s your own fault. If you want a realistic and deep film about living and dying, look elsewhere. If you want to watch two legendary actors dance their way through a sea of Hollywood sentiment, this is the flick for you.