Libertas reviews The Bucket List, starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, and directed by (uh-oh) Rob Reiner:

Edward Cole (Nicholson) is a multi-millionaire who specilaizes in the hostile takeovers of public hospitals in financial trouble which he in turn privatizes. He’s a bit of a shark whose mantra is two to a room, a mantra that comes back to haunt him after he falls ill. To avoid a public outcry of hypocrisy Edward is wheeled in next to auto mechanic Carter Chambers (Freeman), a man just diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

Over the course of the first act the two men bond through their mutual misery brought on by chemotherapy which in the end does both little good. Handed a death sentence, Edward offers to fund all of Carter’s dreams if in exchange Carter will share his, and off they go to leap from airplanes, race cars, ride motorcyles over the Great Wall of China, and enjoy anyplace else the all-too obvious inserted CGI backgrounds will take them.

There’s just one problem. Carter’s a married man with three grown children and yet with less than a year to live he bids his loving and faithful wife goodbye to fulfill all the dreams his familial responsibilities kept him from realizing. The script works hard to rationalize this but in the end it was impossible for me to accept Carter’s choice as anything other than a terribly selfish one, making The Bucket List another piece of damning evidence that those who make the movies today are so hopelessly out of touch with the rest of us it’s no longer funny. The trial to prove this correct would be a short one: “Your Honor, I found a dying Morgan Freeman unsympathetic.” Case closed.

Back at the start of the often appropriately named “naughts”, Thomas Hibbs explored in his book Shows About Nothing that Hollywood's love of nihilism can appear in the strangest places--not just the expected (exploitive horror films such as Martin Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear) but in product such as the long-running and much beloved TV sitcom from whence Hibbs' title derives, war movies, and films such as this one, and seems so ingrained into the L.A. culture, no one even notices it anymore:

The desks a script must pass over before receiving a greenlight are numerous and that not one rational mind saw this as the outrageous wish fulfillment fantasy for narcissists it is, is beyond comprehension. Not only was it impossible for me to sympathize with Carter, I was disgusted with every smile on his face because it was at the expense of a woman forced to deal with the death of her husband of forty-five years alone, and worse, rejected.

And, no, this isn’t a movie where Carter comes to realize his priorities. This is a movie about living life to the fullest … at the expense of whomever. It’s a reverse character arc where the good and dutiful family man looks into the abyss and learns his priorities have been out of order. Work? Family? Kids? Grandkids? Screw that, I’m going to Hong Kong with my new millionaire buddy!

As Libertas's "Dirty Harry" writes:

With this his fifth dud in a row, maybe Hollywood will finally figure out what to do with director Meathead, and that’s to put him in a room with Barry Levinson and Lawrence Kasdan, two other directors way past their prime, and use them as script readers: anything they choose to direct goes in the trash thus saving the studios hundreds of millions.

Don't bet on it.