Entertainment, Movies - Marine Corps Times

Film Review: ‘The Bucket List,’ 3 stars

From the 1950s through the ’70s, it wasn’t that unusual for films to feature large ensembles made up of well-known, top-shelf names.

Doesn’t happen much anymore, mainly because production costs have shot into the ionosphere and paying a fat eight-figure salary to more than one A-list star in the same film just isn’t affordable.

So on the rare occasions when it does happen, it’s an event — even if the film itself doesn’t qualify as a transcendent classic.

That’s the case with “The Bucket List,” the story of two senior citizens with terminal cancer who end up in a hospital room together. They form an unlikely bond in their final months to explore the question of what makes a life “well-lived.”

On the surface, the film has a lot going against it. The first 40 minutes unfolds in a cold, sterile hospital room and features invasive brain surgery, vomiting, night chills and catheters. The final hour demands some serious and sweeping suspension of disbelief from viewers.

And writer Justin Zakham is never as deep or profound on the cosmic questions of life and death as he seems to believe he is.

But the film has an unbeatable pair of aces in the hole: The stars are Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. For fantasy pairings of all-time movie titans, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Edward (Nicholson) is the rich, bombastic tycoon of a company that buys out and then privatizes hospitals. Carter (Freeman) is a blue-collar car mechanic.

In many respects, they’re mirror images. Edward has been married four times and is deeply estranged from his only daughter. “I liked being married, but I liked being single too. … It’s tough to do both at the same time,” he says with a grin.

Carter’s been married 45 years and has a large, loving family, but now that his end is in sight, he’s ruing paths not taken. He dreamed of becoming a history professor, but an unplanned baby forced him to take the first decent job to be found.

“Then 45 years goes by pretty fast,” he muses.

“Like smoke through a keyhole,” Edward agrees.

One day, Edward finds Carter scribbling a list of things to do to before he kicks the bucket. (“Witness something majestic.”)

To Carter, it’s a metaphysical exercise to pass the time. But Edward seizes on the idea as a chance to go out “with guns blazing.” So, like Kerouac and Cassady — or Hope and Crosby — they hit the road, on Edward’s dime, for a whirlwind odyssey that starts with skydiving and race-car driving and segues into a global tour with stops in Egypt, France, Africa, India, Hong Kong and other points in between.

Along the way, they needle, comfort and philosophize with each other about their imminent demise (Edward’s “three things to remember when you get old” brought down the house at my screening), while also filling voids — Edward has enjoyed his life but has given scant joy to others; for Carter, it’s just the opposite.

Toward the end, Zakham’s script slides from sweetly sentimental to weepily maudlin, and director Rob Reiner — no stranger to that territory — does zippo to tamp down that effect. (Hey, not for nothing is Frank Capra’s grandson credited as a co-producer.)

With any other actors, it would all be just a bowl of glop. But Nicholson and Freeman — two of the best of this or any other time — are simply golden.

Buttressed by their talents, “The Bucket List” pulls off a neat trick: a movie about death that not only manages to make you feel good, but also just a little bit more appreciative of life.

Rated PG-13 for language.