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'The Bucket List': Riddled with clichés

By Roger Moore THE ORLANDO SENTINEL

It's a simple exercise. Make a list of all the things you want to do in your life: big experiences, noble goals, altruistic urges. Peering into the Grand Canyon, learning a foreign language or dating a cheerleader, this is what you will squeeze in before you kick the bucket.

Needless to say, that list will change, maybe take on a certain urgency, if you learn you have a terminal illness. What's the old adage? "Nothing focuses the mind like the knowledge of impending death."

That's the premise of Rob Reiner's engaging but well-worn comedy The Bucket List. Pair a rich health care mogul with a working-class mechanic in a hospital room, tell them both they have months to live, and let them work out a list. The rich guy will pay for it. The mechanic-philosopher will provide "meaning."

Jack Nicholson devours the scenery as hospital magnate Edward Cole. Morgan Freeman is Carter Chambers, who has had a real life, just not a lot of fun. The cancer patients, thrown together, decide to make their last months memorable, at least to themselves.

Theirs is a reluctant partnership. The rich guy is a loner, a bon vivant, a jerk who intentionally gets people's names wrong just to put them in their place. The mechanic is a kindly Jeopardy! fanatic, a reader, whose wife and grown children love him. One has sacrificed family for a lifestyle and wealth, the other has given up himself for his family.

But they're "in the same boat," as Cole growls. They shouldn't go gently into that good night. They should skydive, climb a pyramid, "witness something majestic" and wander the Taj Mahal, drive that 1965 Shelby Mustang 350 one of them has always wanted.

So they do.

The Bucket List is a movie that goes down like hospital food: pre-digested. The "list" isn't that original, although the movie's travelogue elements are striking. If they faked sending Freeman, Nicholson and crew to Egypt, Africa and skydiving, they did a good job of it.

The casting is so pre-played that they landed Rob Morrow, years past Northern Exposure, as a doctor, and Sean Hayes, not far removed from Will & Grace, as Cole's smart-aleck assistant.

Then there's the matter of narration. Freeman's character tells the tale in voiceover. Yes, at some point he says, "That's the first time I laid eyes on Edward Cole." If he didn't once narrate, "That's when I first laid eyes on Maggie Fitzgerald" (Million Dollar Baby) or "That's when I first laid eyes on Andy Dufresne" (The Shawshank Redemption) or whomever he laid eyes on in Feast of Love, well, you would swear he did.

First time I laid eyes on Morgan Freeman, in 1987's Street Smart, he had some anger, some edge, not this predictably sweet old storyteller he's been playing far too often since Miss Daisy needed a driver. It's not really his fault that he lends such a homey, comfy vocal presence to the movie's soundtrack. But that is incredibly lazy filmmaking. To steal a word from Cole, it's "cutesy."

That said, there are big laughs and minor moments of grace in The Bucket List, and it's fun to watch them swap lines, Nicholson angry and antic, Freeman laid-back and serene.

Clint Eastwood had to stretch to be the active one to Freeman's passive presence in their films together. Nicholson, his head shaved for his character's brain surgery (bald, he looks like Rod Steiger) doesn't have that burden.

"You always had those freckles?"

"Far as I know, yes."

"Nice. Nice."