The Bucket List

Review By: Dan Deevy
DanDeevy@TheCinemaSource.com

Every milestone in life inevitably brings to mind what lies beyond that final one... And while my most recent entry into my third decade isn’t an immediate call for concern, the feeling of mortality that it evoked is certainly more palpable than it was upon entering my second and surely less so than the (God help me) fourth will be. But the reality of the passage of time is a revelation that will come and go throughout every stage of life right up until the very end.

I know it sounds like a grim thought to base a movie on, but I feel like The Bucket List did a really admirable job of exploring those feelings through two of the most likeable ‘grandpa’s’ out there, the forever young and vibrant Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.

Nicholson plays a man with enormous wealth and power but no family and so of course he ends up in a hospital bed next to his polar opposite, a man with a rich family life but not much in the way of monetary assets or career success played by Freeman. The pair are each diagnosed with a type of cancer that is too virulent to fight but will leave them able bodied and relatively healthy for their final six months to a year of life. Rather than laying around in hospital beds waiting for a miracle cure that will never come, they decide to set out on an adventure around the world doing all the things they said they wanted to before the end. The ‘Bucket List’ is created and becomes the map which they follow leading them to one experience after another each one bringing them closer together.

I think the thing that I loved most about this movie was watching this friendship between two men in their 60’s develop. It’s so often the case in both movies and in life that a persons “true” friends are usually those made at a young age not someone we meet when we’re 40, 50 or even 60 years old. And for everyone who was lucky enough to meet and keep those special people it’s an A-OK idea to cling to and focus on. But how about those of us who don’t have that? Or had it and lost it? In that case, life would have you believe that you’re pretty much just screwed in that department. But this film shows us that as unlikely a situation as the film sets up, it is possible to make true, lasting bonds with people at any point in your life and