Watch The Bucket List before you write yours
Somewhere over the desert, two dying men jump out of a plane, and the joke is that neither one screams. Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman play hospital roommates in Rob Reiner's 2007 comedy, thrown together by matching prognoses and a shared taste for gallows humour. Their list runs to the exotic: motorcycles on the Great Wall, the Taj Mahal at sunrise. There's a tattoo neither of them wanted, too. It's 97 minutes of two men outrunning the thing they can't outrun, and it plays better as instruction than entertainment. What stays with you isn't the skydiving footage but the quiet scene afterwards, Freeman checking his own pulse, still faintly surprised to find one.
Practical
- Cost
- $0–5 (rental or streaming)
- Best time
- Any time of year, though it lands harder in winter
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time it takes
- 97 minutes, one sitting
- What people get wrong
- People expect a straightforward feel-good checklist film and are caught off guard by how much of it sits with dying rather than doing. Some also assume it's based on real events; it's an original script, not a true story.
- With
- A group