The Bucket List (2007)

The Bucket List comes to us from 2007 with a premise that could not be simpler and a title that has since entered the language. Two terminally ill men, a billionaire healthcare tycoon named Edward Cole and a blue-collar mechanic named Carter Chambers, share a hospital room and then a globe-trotting farewell tour. Rob Reiner directs with the steady hand of a man assembling a very large greeting card, and the result means well in the vaguest possible sense.

Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson share top billing, one Black, one white, and the film never once mentions it. The casting is integrated in the casual manner of an earlier era, diversity present but unremarked, which by modern standards registers as representation without a thesis. Race is simply not a subject here. Neither is anything else beyond mortality and the advisability of skydiving at seventy. Edward's enormous wealth funds the entire expedition, and the screenplay regards his fortune with open affection: he is the generous benefactor, never the target. Carter's wife Virginia exists to object to the trip and then to fade. The film's carpe diem message is pushed hard, though through sentiment and montage, not through social instruction. Roger Ebert, who knew the territory firsthand, called it a laff riot followed by a dime-store epiphany, and he was not wrong.

What we have, then, is a film innocent of nearly every contemporary preoccupation. No queer presence, no environmental conscience, no body politics, no neurodivergence, no revisionist history, no lecture beyond the gentle reminder to hug someone. Carter's trivia obsession is a charming hobby and nothing more. The movie opened at number one and earned its budget back several times over. That, for a studio, was the only list that mattered.