The Bucket List

By Nathan Young

It's hard to imagine a funny movie being crafted about two men dying of cancer. When you add an all-star filmmaking team of director Rob Reiner and legendary actors Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, it's also hard to imagine such a movie being a bad one.

As it turns out, 'The Bucket List' is both funny and good. It follows two men on a journey to pack in a lifetime's worth of fun into two weeks. The movie is predictable and at times overly sentimental, but in the end it is a fun and often amusing tale that I am giving a 'thumbs up'.

Edward Cole (Nicholson) is a wealthy hospital adminstrator who is as grumpy as he is rich. He prefers to run his hospitals on a shoestring budget. This comes back to haunt him when he is admitted to one of his own hospitals and is forced to share a room with a dying cancer patient named Carter Chambers (Freeman). Carter is as positive and friendly as Cole is sarcastic and abrasive.

After a brief feeling out period, the two begin to strike up a friendship. One day Edward finds a piece of crumpled up paper on the floor and finds that it is Carter's "bucket list" (so called because it is a lists of things to do before you "kick the bucket").

Intrigued by the idea but not with the items on Carter's list, Edward (who's also been diagnosed with a terminal illness) suggests they make a better list and then go out and live it. Carter reluctantly agrees over the loud objections of his wife (Beverly Todd), and the pair set out on a whirlwind tour of skydiving, car racing, and sight seeing every where from Paris to Cairo.

This movie is entertaining, although it falls short of being great. The audience seemed to be genuinely engaged and there were several sustained moments of laughter. The biggest one came in a scene towards the end where Carter explains to Edward where his beloved gourmet coffee comes from.

Nicholson and Freeman, working together onscreen for the first time in their illustrious careers, make a great team. Nicholson plays the cautsic old man that he made famous in 'As Good As It Gets' and 'About Schmidt' and Freeman is the reliable good guy audiences have grown accustomed to. Freeman even provides a voiceover track, reminiscent of his role in 'The Shawshank Redemption'.

This movie is a fun and touching story of two men making peace with their own mortality. I recommend it to movie fans young and old, especially to those who are fans of Nicholson and Freeman.