'The Bucket List'

Rating:

BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

December 21, 2007

Jack Nicholson, playing a terminally ill billionaire, interrupts a board meeting to ask someone in a tone of withering impatience, "Did you ever read 'The Divine Comedy'? Dante Alighieri's journey into hell?"

In point of fact, signor Alighieri also made significant stops in purgatory and heaven on his journey. But you wouldn't think to correct Jack Nicholson once he puts on that scary mask of high dudgeon, the same one that made mincemeat of the persnickety diner waitress in "Five Easy Pieces."

Emulating Nicholson's reductive version of Dante, "The Bucket List" never ascends from the bowels of tearjerk formula and audience pandering to a redemptive place of truth and art. In Rob Reiner's sodden comedy, Nicholson and Morgan Freeman recycle old screen personas with an abandon that borders on self-parody. Nicholson's Edward Cole plays a variation on his adorable misanthrope (see "As Good As It Gets"), while Freeman's know-it-all car mechanic, Carter Chambers, is another in his resume of unimpeachably noble and morally scrupulous teachers of life. In other words, he's playing God again, God in a grease-monkey suit.

Cole and Chambers meet cute in a hospital room where they each learn that they have but months to live. (They are both suffering from cancer of the celluloid, that particular strain that enables you to knock on heaven's door with all of your body fat intact.) Chambers is unimpressed by Cole's demonstrations of wealth and power (he happens to own the hospital they are staying in), while Cole is mildly irritated by his roommate's exhibitions of historical trivia knowledge.

It is not long, however, before the two men are thick as thieves and conspiring to steal a few extravagant joys from their remaining days on earth. Working from a wish-list of things to do before they die ("laugh 'til you cry," "go sky-diving," "help a complete stranger to the good"), they set off to on a globe-trotting excursion of daredevil adventure and indulgence, crossing off their bucket list as they go along.

Justin Zackham's button-pressing screenplay includes the obligatory spoilsport wife for Chambers (Beverly Todd) and a saucy administrative assistant for Cole ("Will and Grace's" Sean Hayes, ferreting out the film's few nuggets of zest). Marc Shaiman's generic score milks the setup for all its inspirational laughs and tears; this is the sort of slick entertainment machine you get stuck watching on a cross-country flight, tanked up on $3 cocktails.

It doesn't take much hooch to get woozy and combative over "The Bucket List." My own breaking point came when our two intrepid buddies neglected to check "witness something majestic" off their list after seeing the Taj Mahal. Maybe it's a little fruitless to try to deconstruct a Rob Reiner movie, but did the writer ever visit the Taj Mahal? While we're on it, did he ever read "The Divine Comedy"?

THE BUCKET LIST (PG-13). Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman phone it in as a pair of codgers who indulge in one last spree before heading off to that feel-good movie in the sky. Directed by Rob Reiner, in Hallmark greeting card mode. 1:38 (language, including a sexual reference). Opens Tuesday at area theaters.