This terminally ill, terminally awful dramedy marks a sad cinematic milestone: The Bucket List is the first film in history to feature a truly wretched Nicholson performance — and we're not talking about the character he plays. As health-care billionaire Edward Cole — yet another self-important, cantankerous hedonist as late-era Jack is wont to phone in — the trademark charm of the eyebrow-arching devil has apparently grown too old to counterbalance his penchant for showy vulgarity. Early on, as Nicholson's entrepreneur defends the overcrowding of his hospital to a city council, he coughs up blood, signaling his first symptom of cancer. An effortless heartstring pull for a far lesser actor, the flamboyantly saucer-eyed reaction shot with which Nicholson greets the camera isn't at all poignant, just gross. Once upon a time, the star could even sell an icky bit like "Never pass up a bathroom, never waste a hard-on, and never trust a fart." Instead, Nicholson makes such twaddle even more embarrassing than it already is.
Without further beating up on a burnt-out septuagenarian, I'll note that the screen legend is only partly responsible for a calamitous whole. The bulk of the problem is Justin Zackham's dull and presumptuously manipulative screenplay, which sees working-class mechanic Carter Chambers (Freeman), a trivia obsessive who also learns he's dying of cancer, sharing a hospital room with mismatched buddy Edward. Straight man Freeman fares better than crazy coot Nicholson, but he's still forced to repeat his own career clichés — nostalgic voiceovers here, avuncular wisdoms there. When the two decide to break out of the ward to fulfill their "bucket list" (as in, before they kick the you-know-what), their extravagant fantasies can't even be vicariously felt because each getaway around the world (France, Egypt, the Himalayas) looks like a green-screen soundstage. In fact, an overlong skydiving sequence literally superimposes the actors’ digital heads on the bodies of other free-fallers — so whose uplift are we meant to be sharing?
Coming to terms with one's own mortality becomes a graver matter when the expiration date is known, but The Bucket List's emotional conflict emerges only in shallow carpe-diem platitudes. Even if we cut director Reiner some slack for having more credible expertise in comedy (wagering that This Is Spinal Tap is more perennial than, say, A Few Good Men), there isn't a single cheeseball joke in this entire borscht-belt debacle that hits with any sense of timing. By the end, when Edward's impassive assistant (Will & Grace's Hayes) honors his boss's remote memorial request in what might've been a sweet and touching coda elsewhere, it suddenly becomes clear that it's the movie writ large: lifelessness that will soon be forgotten.
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