The Bucket List: Critic Reviews

It's fun, for two minutes, to see Nicholson and Freeman jumping out of a plane, but once they've gotten tattoos and raced vintage cars, the movie is already scraping the bottom of the bucket.

The Bucket List operates on the hope that two beloved stars rubbing their signature screen personas together can spark warm, fuzzy box office magic.

It's superficial, manipulative and schmaltzy.

The overall sense is of a movie coasting on an obvious and somewhat flimsy premise, to which no one thought to bring much else besides Nicholson and Freeman.

It's impossible to mistake the movie for inspired.

[Nicholson and Freeman] are skilled at squeezing emotion from a cheeseball script (as is Reiner, who, knowing the score, doesn't try to rein them in).

Despite some emotional dips and a see-it-to-believe-it load of schmaltz at the end, The Bucket List is mostly a joy ride with good company, and the actors obviously were having a high time on their traveling boondoggle.

Not every film about death needs a bald Swede and a game of chess: Sometimes, the sky-diving's enough.

Bucket's rush to sentiment leads you to think the film, not its characters, is soon to expire.

Watching Nicholson and Freeman on the same screen and their characters Edward and Carter embarking on a sojourn of discovery is hard to resist.

In general, the light is golden, the mood technologically sublime, the actuality of the experience a dead zero.

I urgently advise hospitals: Do not make the DVD available to your patients; there may be an outbreak of bedpans thrown at TV screens.

A manipulative look at dying with dignity and a lame yarn about as realistic as the fantasy in The Princess Bride.

This being Oscar-coveting Hollywood claptrap, class barriers vanish as the two become best friends and Nicholson bankrolls a spree in which they indulge their deepest romantic whims.

Nothing wrong about a movie that says, Stop and smell the roses. Now, if only director Rob Reiner hadn't rubbed our noses in a bouquet of plastic blooms.

Great actors sometimes transcend their material, but Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman can't pull their boots free from the ankle-deep schmaltz of The Bucket List.

By the end of The Bucket List, silliness has been replaced by pretension, and while there may not be a dry eye in the theater, many of those tears will be shed in embarrassment for giving in to such hooey.

The Bucket List must have seemed like a good idea -- around 1985.

The Bucket List is a messy free-for-all, but it's a genuine pleasure to watch two hired hands literally running the rodeo.

A picture about two cancer patients confronting reality, and deciding how they want to spend their presumed last days, that has not an ounce of reality about it.

The eternal human struggle for answers is an unusually resonant chord for a big-budget studio movie to strike.

There are big laughs and minor moments of grace in The Bucket List. It's also fun to watch these two swap lines, Nicholson angry and antic, Freeman laid back and serene.

All involved in this tepid excuse for feel-good entertainment seem to have checked out long before the faint pulse died.

You get the performances you expect from these two great stars, which lift this story mercifully but marginally above its meager content.