The Bucket List Review

The Bucket List nearly kicks the bucket but saves itself at the end. Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman banter, spar and trek together in The Bucket List.

Insanely rich and shamelessly rabid hospital owner Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson) is subject to his own hospital care when he is diagnosed with the big C, cancer. One of the rules in his hospital is no private rooms. No matter how hard he kicks, screams, pouts and shouts, he can't be transferred out of the room he shares with car mechanic Carter Chambers (Morgan Freeman.) Over several months the men form a bound as they come to terms with the fact that they are going to die. While infirmed they create a list of things to do, some pretty typical and some pretty fantastic.

The two main actors, Nicholson and Freeman, suffered from rock the boat acting and the writers set the perfect storm around them. Sometimes they were up, sometimes down; mostly they made me feel as if I was in a bulimic food fight. Most of the chuckles come from one liners that would have been better delivered during a stand up act in a Las Vegas bar. The jokes could have been taken right out of a Saturday Night Live skit (if SNL were a slightly better show) and pulled off as poorly as an Saturday Night Live skit (almost) and shot as beautifully as a correspondent segment on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

And oh the green-screening; it does appear as a character unto itself in The Bucket List. I guess there was no budget for things like travel, and why bother when you can green screen at 42% of the quality and pretend to go anywhere. Couple that with the wind blown look the actors have throughout most of the flick and you have a 42.75% satisfactory experience. Plus, you keep the makers of florescent green paint and super gigantic fans in business. An economic bonus!

Then it happens, from nowhere, out of the blue and seemingly at random, the tears come. Right at the end, like a well made short film, the characters do something that made me choke back my tears as I sat stunned by what I was feeling. The Bucket List is a like a sleeping coiled cobra of emotion that you accidently step on as you are running away to preserve your sanity. I don't think the writers meant to lull me into a false sense of crappiness, I think they did it on accident when they had 87 minutes of trash movie and only ten minutes of truly touching content which gets crammed into the last moments of the movie. Sure, some writers my use the gold nugget at the end of the colon trick but I sense that is not the case in The Bucket List.

Even if I did have to wait until the end of the poo log, The Bucket List's gold nugget is truly valuable. I felt connected to the characters, moved by the last things on their list and shocked by my commitment to them. I had to sit and recover from the ending, taking in the sweet sadness.

The Bucket List is worth watching for the last few moments alone. When you feel like giving up, don't give up, it's actually worth it!