A BUCKET HALF EMPTY



The Bucket List (12A)
reviewed by David Mahmoudieh
at the UK premier, Leicester Sq, London


In 1986 director Rob Reiner gave us one of the outstanding films of the eighties in Stand By Me, the perennial tale of nihilism versus nobility; of young zest budding out to explore this world and all the cruelties associated with growing up in it. Twenty years later, Reiner has inverted not only the premise of his greatest cinematic success, but sadly, also its appeal.

Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson play men dying of cancer. One is the ill-mannered Edward Cole, a billionaire hospital owner and all-round priggish, sanctimonious majesty of mockery, permanently afflicted with a hunger for the high-life. The other is the philosophical Carter Chambers, a humble, happily-married coulda-woulda-shoulda with only a 45-year CV as a car mechanic and an uncanny talent for general knowledge to his name. Thanks to the predictabilities of Hollywood casting, you really don’t need me to tell you who plays who, now, do you?

“I run hospitals not health-spas; two patients to a room – no exceptions” is the branded declaration of Nicholson’s Cole. So when he falls sick and has to receive a taste of his own medicine at his under-performing hospital, the enforcement of his rule comes back to haunt him as the inflated Cole finds himself room-sharing with Freeman’s feet-on-the-ground Carter. At completely opposite ends of the social scale but made to endure each other’s company, an unlikely friendship blossoms over the course of Carter and Cole’s treatments and before long both men find themselves musing over the particulars of life, death and all that lies in-between.


(Morgan Freeman arrives at last night's screening)

Inspired by their cogitations, and drawing upon an old lesson from his philosophy lecturer in college, Carter decides to devise a ‘bucket list’ – a list of things to do before you, so to speak, ‘kick the bucket’. How reverent.

Soon what was scribbled down in reluctant fantasy is made a reality as Cole stumps up the cash for both men to up and leave in pursuit of their dying dreams, the smile-while-you-talk Freeman as navigator, the sunglasses-and-cigar-clad Nicholson as the man with the wallet to make it all happen. And that, to borrow the title of Nicholson’s last remotely credible film, is about As Good As It Gets.

Downhill viewing ensues and the all-too predictable pair jet off on their all-too predictable up-the-mountain-and-down-again expeditions, the story suddenly losing whatever trace of distinction it had somehow up to that point retained.

The Bucket List really is one of those films so negligible that all intended meaning and recollection has left you by the time you’ve folded the cinema seat back up. The jokes are old or only laughed at because of who they’re being told by and the plot chases its own tail for an hour before jumping the fence of reason and retiring back to whichever kennel of indecent thought it crawled out from. I don’t think there’s possibly ever been a more conceited script.


(Timo Gilbert, star of my short-film The Confession also attended)


At little over an hour-and-a-half in length, the narrative is both rushed and intervallic, with no real defining moments to put the events we’re witnessing into any consequential perspective. One minute we’re skydiving, the next we’re mustang-racing, then we’re visiting the pyramids, then riding a motorcycle over the Great Wall of China. Africa, India, the Himalayas. And all of them done the most tremendous of injustices in the fact that absolutely none of these places were visited in real life. Everything is a CGI or blue-screen mess.

Personally I find the fake backgrounds rather fitting, considering the rest of this tripe is a mere exploitation of a common origin of sympathy, serving to do little more than de-value the currency of as grave an issue as cancer.

Naturally the overriding issue of death and its impending arrival is arguably the greatest protagonist of them all. It’s a feeling we can all identify with – if not through our own experiences, then certainly at least from death’s borrowing of those who were once tangibly and now imperceptibly remain closest to us.

But here the theme is handled like a hot potato, a plot device passed from palm to palm then filed away under “bang the wasp’s nest: completed”.

I actually struggle to recall such a poor film from a director of Reiner’s talent and track-record. Reiner has proved himself as one of cinema’s great manipulators of the human psyche, and his larger than life personality alone gives him a certain face-value lovability. But The Bucket List simply cannot be excused. A badly made film? No. It’s just soulless, in the most exemplary Hollywood fashion.

When introducing his actors to the audience at the UK Premiere in London a few weeks ago, Reiner told us, “These are the two finest actors in the world”. He may well be right, so this is one workman who certainly can’t blame his tools.

That said, with such indolent, non-committal performances as this, I question whether there can possibly be anything left on Nicholson and Freeman's own bucket lists - except cashing that huge cheque, of course.

The coreless script, as previously mentioned, certainly doesn’t help. On the rare occasion that affairs become even vaguely truth-seeking and you think there’s a line worth listening to, Nicholson interrupts with a joke about farts. Well, if this isn’t Oscar material I don’t know what is.

If nothing else, The Bucket List serves to underline (though the word ‘undermine’ could conversely suffice) the significance of the journey, not the destination. A tad predictable? Very. And it may well have been prosaic if not for Freeman and Nicholson. Neither performs astoundingly, but both are playing characters we’re so stereotypically used to seeing them portray that it renders them with such a familiarity that we accept whatever they’re about to say before either have even opened their mouths. Speaking of which (no pun intended) Freeman’s voice is, as always these days, borrowed for narration.

As for Nicholson, well he flashes that trustworthy combination of trademark grin and raised eyebrows in abundance. But even they aren’t enough to divert our attentions from his overly-eccentric articulation, awkwardly orating through sprawling sentences where each word is mouthed or dwelled on for quite literally a number of seconds.


(Reiner - w/mic - talks up the talents of Morgan &
Nicholson either side of him before unveiling his film to us)

To Reiner’s credit, the film could have been much worse. He builds up the necessary momentum between Edward and Carter during the forging of their friendship in that claustrophobic hospital room, allowing the character’s merits and mutual appreciation for beings different to themselves to spill over into one another.

But towards the latter stages events merely seem to roll from speech to speech – and you know when one’s coming, by and large from Freeman, notably because there’s this huge, ominous sigh before every one of them.

I’ve little doubt The Bucket List’s pulling power will fill seats at cinemas across the country, and indeed the film has already gone on to become No. 1 at the US box office. But, critically-speaking, Reiner’s film is a piece of work from a director clearly too out of touch with contemporary audiences to know what’s in, what’s out and what’s left to be done.

Now where’s that bucket?


© David Mahmoudieh 2008