The Bucket List

Starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman
Directed by Rob Reiner
From Warner Brothers Pictures

Every so often the perfect vehicle comes along for the actors, director and audience. “The Bucket List” directed beautifully by Rob Reiner, is one such vehicle bringing together bad boy, Oscar winning actor Jack Nicholson together with strong and soft-spoken legend Morgan Freeman who live their last days together comparing their bucket lists, “things to do before they kick the bucket.”

Nicholson plays a wealthy hospital chain owner who is treated in one of his own hospitals and forced by his own management/ownership principals to stay in a room with auto repair shop employee Morgan Freeman. It brilliantly questions who is the richer and poorer man and when both are diagnosed with terminal illness they spend time together travelling the globe and doing everything on their bucket list.

After such a seemingly narcissistic idea, both men discover a deeper meaning to life. It is warm, intense, questions all that we think we know about life and death. They come to a deathbed realisation about the coffee Nicholson drinks that leaves them both in hysterical laughter. It made me laugh out loud (much to the distress of those sitting within a couple of rows on my KLM flight) and cry at the end. And that is what life is really about, laughing until your entire body aches and crying tears of joy for lives well and truly lived.

George Bernard Shaw said it best, “This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”

Make yourself happy and see this film.
Vadimus Post Rating: A+

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