The Plot: (Spoilers)
Auto mechanic Carter (Morgan Freeman), a trivia buff, gets a call at work with bad news.
Carter was having a good day until he got some bad news
Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson), at a county commissioners meeting where he is trying to privatize a struggling local hospital under his company, starts coughing up blood.
Carter & Edward end up sharing a room at one of the hospitals Edward runs, due to his policy of “two beds to a room, no exceptions.” Turns out that he never had a problem with that, as he’d never been sick before, but his assistant Tom (Sean Hayes) says it would cause a big PR problem for him to make an exception for himself.
Edward has cancer, and after an operation, doctors give Edward only a 5% chance of survival. Over the next few weeks, they get to know each other and become friends. Carter has been in and out of the hospital for months, undergoing an experimental treatment. He has a wife named Virginia (Beverly Todd) and three grown children (one of which is played by Morgan Freeman’s real-life son Alfonso Freeman). He always wanted to be a history professor but dropped out of college when Virginia became pregnant, and he never had the chance to go back, even though he always wanted to. Edward has been married and divorced four times, and says he was never married long enough to have any kids. One night, Carter starts making a “bucket list” that he won’t show Edward. Edward’s doctor comes in to deliver his test results, which aren’t good: Edward has 6 months to a year to live. Edward asks the doctor to find out Carter’s status, as Carter’s doctor is hard to get a hold of. Carter finds out that he too only has about a year left. He crumples up his list and throws it on the floor.
The next morning, Edward finds the list and asks what it is. Carter explains that his old philosophy teacher once assigned them to make a list of things they wanted to do before they “kicked the bucket” and he was re-doing the list for himself. Edward likes the idea and adds things like “go skydiving,” “get a tattoo” and “kiss the most beautiful girl in the world” to Carter’s existing list of “witness something truly breathtaking,” “help a complete stranger for the good,” “laugh till I cry” and “drive a Shelby Mustang.” Edward convinces Carter into fulfilling the list together, as they are both asymptomatic. Carter’s wife doesn’t understand and blames Edward for taking her husband away.
They start with the skydiving, which terrifies Carter but Edward enjoys it. Edward’s assistant Tom is tagging along to arrange everything, whose name is actually Matthew, but Edward prefers to call him “Tom.” They go on to driving muscle cars on a racetrack; Carter gets to drive a Shelby GT350 Mustang while Edward drives a Dodge Challenger R/T. Carter gets a little wild in his driving, intentionally bumping Edward’s car and challenging him over a small jump. They go to a tattoo parlor and Edward gets an elaborate tattoo of himself but Carter refuses, saying he doesn’t see anything he wants to be stuck with.
They continue on an African safari and visit the pyramids in Egypt. On top of one of the pyramids, Edward tells Carter why he doesn’t see his daughter anymore. When she was about to get married, there was something about her fiancĂ© that led Edward to oppose the marriage. Naturally, he wasn’t invited to the wedding. The husband turned out be abusive, and the first time he hit Emily, she came to Edward, but said that it wasn’t her husband’s fault as he’d been drinking and she started the fight, but she still loved him. The next time, Edward heard about it from his ex-wife, and he hired someone to “take care of it.”All he knows is that the husband wasn’t killed and Emily never saw him again. When Emily found out what Edward did, she declared that he was dead to her.
They ride the Great Wall of China on a motorcycle and then try to climb Mount Everest to fulfill “witness something truly majestic” but they are too late in the season; a storm has already moved in and they won’t be able to climb till the next spring. Edward suggest that maybe it is a sign that it is time for them to go home, but Carter knows he’s just talking about him and refuses.
My review:
This movie is carried by the acting, and Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson are as excellent as ever. Most of the supporting cast isn’t very prominent, but Sean Hayes does a very good job as the long-suffering assistant of Jack Nicholson’s eccentric character, and the two have some amusing banter. Beverly Todd also does a good job as Virginia. The plot works well; most of the moments in the trip are fun to watch, and the ending is a tearjerker. If there is anything I can criticize in this movie, it is that both of the main characters seem to have a lot of energy and little difficulties from their cancer or the treatments from the beginning of their trip until Carter suddenly collapses at home, and they don’t seem to need any significant treatment during their trip. I don’t know much about cancer, but this seems unlikely at best. This didn’t make the movie any less enjoyable to me, however.
The Bucket List is an enjoyable movie with two great actors.
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