** 1/2
Morgan Freeman, Jack Nicholson, Sean Hayes, Beverly Todd
Directed by Rob Reiner
Rated PG-13
Opens Friday
Early in The Bucket List, a new buddy picture directed by Rob Reiner, each of the film’s protagonists discovers that he has only a few months left to live—a year at most. Carter Chambers, a trivia-obsessed auto mechanic played by Morgan Freeman, is the first to receive the dire news, over the phone; the shock causes him to drop his cigarette, which is precisely the sort of hackneyed, melodramatic visual signpost you might expect from a treacly Hollywood crowd-pleaser. A bit later, however, when hospital magnate Edward Cole (Nicholson) is told that he’s terminal, Reiner—or perhaps screenwriter Justin Zackham—finds a genuinely fresh perspective. Cole is so spectacularly wealthy, and so ridiculously lazy, that he’s watching the TV set in his hospital room while lying completely prone, using a special pair of eyeglasses that reflects the image downward at a 90-degree angle. We see only his eyeballs, reflected in the twin mirrors, and the entire you’re-gonna-croak scene is staged in this memorably surreal fashion, so that Cole barely even appears human.
The Bucket List drops the cigarette too frequently to be considered a good movie, but it’s a mildly pleasant surprise all the same, given its dire reputation and Reiner’s recent track record. A poll of more than 100 critics nationwide (including myself) deemed it the worst movie of 2007 (tied with Southland Tales, which got my vote), so I went in expecting to have my eyeballs seared by shameless pandering and grotesque mugging, and instead found innocuous mediocrity. Indeed, people who despise The Bucket List seem to be responding primarily to its admittedly noxious premise, which suggests that imminent death isn’t so terrible provided that you or someone you know has loads of ready cash. Chambers draws up a list of things he’d like to do before his final kick, Cole adds several items, and the next thing you know they’re flitting around the globe in Cole’s private jet, carpe-ing the holy hell out of every precious diem they have left.
It’s here that Zackham’s screenplay suffers from a pathetic dearth of imagination. You’d think that two men with near-infinite resources, haunted day and night by a loudly ticking clock, could come up with something better than a belated midlife crisis crossed with Fodor’s Greatest Hits. Those who’ve suffered through the film’s trailer will be relieved, as I was, to learn that there isn’t nearly as much skydiving, auto racing and other Stupid Geezer Tricks as that rambunctious précis suggests. But even when Chambers and Cole are just sitting around swapping meaningful anecdotes, they’re always within spitting distance of some major tourist attraction—though even the least sophisticated viewer will intuit that it’s a green screen, onto which the Egyptian pyramids or the Taj Mahal has been ineptly superimposed.
Still, any buddy movie rises or falls on the chemistry between its stars, and Freeman’s avuncular warmth offsets Nicholson’s irascible cynicism in a predictable but nonetheless satisfying way. And even at its most formulaic, the film manages the occasional surprise. As soon as it’s revealed that Cole has a daughter with whom he hasn’t spoken in years, you can’t help but plot the obvious emotional trajectory—but when Chambers shoves his new friend toward a reconciliation, Cole not only refuses but also voices the very objections you yourself had lodged the instant this subplot was introduced. I actually wondered whether the movie might end without the touching reunion that dramatic convention dictates.
It doesn’t, of course. But I have to give this lackluster but perfectly watchable effort just a little credit for making me think, for an instant, that it might.