It’s been a while since Jack Nicholson has made a big impact on me, in fact I think the last time out that he really pulled out the stops prior to The Departed was About Schmidt. Here he teams up with Morgan Freeman star in Rob Reiner’s The Bucket List which is billed as a comedy/drama. I did a double take at that, because the subject matter is about two dying cancer patients, albeit ambitious ones, that being the movies premise.

Edward Cole (Nicholson) is a hugely successful businessman, who finds himself in the same ward as Carter Chambers (Freeman), and the pair hit it off, with Chambers coming up with an idea to create a list of their hitherto unrealised ambitions and work through them before their illness takes them out. Since Cole is wealthy, he can bankroll the whole thing and there we have the plot, story and in effect movie in one shot. Conveniently the pair manage to get through a lot of this schoolboy high jinks before they are ill, with some witty dialogue and sarcasm that Nicholson of course uses like a weapon, whilst Freeman seems to relish the role as another one of those almost Zen-like figures, always the calm and astute player.

The problem of course is that the situation itself is not funny, even though the performances are good, Nicholson plays himself in the same way that John Wayne always did, and we accept that part, Freeman too has a persona we have come to recognise and be comfortable with, but these two dying and playing for laughs? It seems somehow wrong, and I imagine that people in such a position might be somewhat unhappy at the trivialisation of their plight. Maybe that is over sensitive claptrap, so we’ll just move along.

There is a been there, done that feel to the film, in that it goes over ground that Nicholson at least has travelled before, As Good As It Gets for instance, and that he is simply re-playing that part without much of an effort. The set pieces are OK, the script is pretty sharp, and the riposte between the two main characters drives the film along at a pace. The tone however is mildly patronizing, and it felt overall like a flimsy remake of something better that had gone before, it never convinced me that it was more than a sentimental and somewhat bloated effort to reel you in with the one liners and sucker punch you into the syrupy clichés and obvious end.

5.5/10, It is not a terrible film, in fact in one or two places it is very funny, but only the two A-Listers in Nicholson and Freeman rescue it from being another tearjerker - with a thick helping of comedy. Perhaps a less condescending tone would have made it less jarring.