Cynical Cinema

Seth Rogen was clearly the fat kid in high school. The funny fat kid, mind you, but also the one who was picked on a little. Which is why, in every movie he writes, the fat kid gets all the best lines. It worked amazingly well in Superbad with Jonah Hill, and it works almost as well in Drillbit Taylor, out tomorrow, July 1st, from Paramount Home Entertainment. The fat kid in Drillbit Taylor is played by Troy Gentile, who is almost as good as Hill in Superbad. It’s too bad the rest of the film doesn’t live up to that promise.

Because really, Drillbit Taylor is nothing but a “prequel” to Superbad. The same characters are there - the geeky best friends, one fat one mild-mannered and skinny. Their third friend who is far geekier than either. And the fat kid is still actively trying to get rid of the even-nerdier kid, because he will bring them down in the eyes of the “cool kids”. So - the kids from Superbad, four years earlier. Seth Rogen co-wrote the script for this film with Kristofor Brown, and Judd Apatow produced the movie, so the pieces were in place to make something on the level of Superbad, if not Knocked Up or 40 Year Old Virgin. But…this movie sucks.

It’s not Owen Wilson’s fault. He plays his standard, overly-sincere loser character. But the movie isn’t written to fit his style, his style isn’t adjusted to fit the movie, and he feels miscast because every scene he’s in is worse than every scene where it’s just the kids on their own. And Wilson is in almost every scene. He plays a homeless man who poses as a bodyguard to get hired by some kids to protect them from the high school bully. In order to do this, he poses as a substitute teacher at the school. Making him a homeless guy posing as a bodyguard posing as a teacher. Why is he homeless? He doesn’t have a substance abuse problem or a mental problem. And he seems to be more than willing to work for money - in fact, he’s going WAY out of his way to fake his way into this job…it doesn’t make sense.

Also fairly strange is the school bully. I don’t remember school having bullies like this, ever. Bullying in schools usually involved the threat of force and the teasing and the shoving, but never punching kids and beating them and attacking them on a daily basis. These bullies are implausible, but then if they weren’t so mean and violent, the little kids wouldn’t need a bodyguard. I guess. And the young kids are bullied their first day of school in grade nine by some kids who are 18 years old and clearly, at least, in grade twelve. So…how come they’re in the same classes? Are we to believe that the bullies have failed every single year they’ve spent in high school? Or just that nobody bothered to think that through?

In the end, these are the minor problems with Drillbit Taylor. The major problem, amazingly enough, is the script. Other than some truly memorable lines from Troy Gentile, there is nothing funny about the rest of the movie. At all. Owen Wilson is not funny. His character is not funny. His sexual conquest of another teacher at the school is not funny. The other two kids are not funny. The bully is not funny. And the concept, while kind of interesting on the surface, is never explored at all. This ends up being exactly like every other overcoming a high school bully movie, and might actually be the most predictable movie in years. The second we meet Owen Wilson, as Drillbit Taylor, we know exactly what will happen, in every scene, for the entire rest of the movie.

Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow have managed to turn standard movie arcs and plots into true gold. Superbad was so funny and smart that you forgot very fast that you had seen this exact movie many times before. Just never that funny. Knocked Up was a movie many others have made in the past - but writing it from the guy’s perspective was something the fifty-five movies like it had never thought to do. And it was so funny and smart that you forgot you’d seen it before. But Drillbit Taylor is not one of these movies.

I think the success of their oeuvre has made Apatow and Rogen such sought-after commodities that studios and producers will purchase absolutely anything they do. And if that includes a throwaway script that they wrote in high school and never edited and forgot about for fifteen years, then so be it. Which is, I think, what happened in the case of Drillbit Taylor. This movie is a total waste of time.

Ice Cube is actually a fairly good actor.  In movies like Barbershop (which was very good), he has shown he has the capacity to move beyond the tough-guy Vin Diesel-in-XXX type characters he plays, and also past the tough-guy-falling-down, Vin Diesel-in-The Pacifier type characters he plays.  And yet, outside Barbershop and the occasional scene in certain other movies, he has never even tried.  Once again, in First Sunday, he returns to the familiar formulas that have made him reasonably successful over the past few years.  The buddy that does dumb things and gets him into trouble, a la Friday.  The girl who has an eye for him, and wants to love him underneath that tough-guy-idiot exterior, if only she can find the heart in the man, a la Next Friday.  And so on and so forth.

 Most irritating of all in First Sunday is the supporting cast.  Every single character in this film is a cartoon.  Ice Cube and his stupid friend (played in this particular film by Tracey Morgan) are desperate for money, so they decide to rob a church.  A church populated by the hot chick, the crass granny, the evil deacon who’s embezzling the church’s funds, the kindly and understanding pastor, and the irritating, painfully flamboyant moron choir director.  The resolution of the film is almost as idiotic as the set-up, and the underlying theme of Ice Cube wanting to keep his son around him in the city could be played for some decent dramatic effect, but this film treats it just as a means to an end. 

There is nothing funny in First Sunday, and since it is ostensibly a “comedy”, that means there is no reason to rent it.

It’s a Boy Girl thing comes out tomorrow, June 24th, from Alliance Films. It’s a teen comedy with a familiar plot twist. The high school all-star quarterback and the really nerdy girl who lives next to him somehow switch bodies. And so now the nerdy girl learns all about being the football star, and the quarterback learns about being the nerdy girl, and they eventually fall in love with each other. Blah blah blah. These comedies are normally incredibly predictable, boring and painfully-PG. But there is good news here! This movie - is R-rated! There is nudity! And swearing! Maybe, just maybe, this one has a chance!

But NO! This is still the exact same movie as all the others. The smart chick who’s hotter than the head cheerleader, but no one sees it because she’s smart and nerdy and really into her grades and wants to go to Yale. The quarterback who can’t escape his destiny, the one who’s worried that this is all I’ll ever be! And even coming out of the mouths of people of different sexes, it’s still the same movie. And the hookup between the Shakespeare-reading hottie and the all-star athlete hottie at the end of the movie is the most painful cliche in high school teen comedies. I feel like screaming at the screen - Dude! It’s high school! You won’t be together for more than a year! It’s high school! This will not be the love of a lifetime here. You’re not going to get married. You are going to break up in college and sleep with everyone you meet. THAT is how this is going to work.

But the biggest sin this movie commits is not going all-out. It occupies some irritating middle ground between what could have been and what always is. If you’re going to show boobs and coarse language, and two hot people have switched bodies, go with it. Show the guy, in the hot babe’s body, playing with her boobs because he can. Show him hanging out in the girl’s locker room, looking at all the boobs. Show the girl “accidentally” grazing the boobs of the other hot chicks who are also naked. Show her (with her guy’s mind) trying to hit on a hot chick. Show the virginal, never-been-with-a-boy chick playing around with the new guy’s body, seeing how things work. Or reaching in a fascinated manner for other guys’ junk. There is potential for masturbation jokes, lesbian scenes, homosexual humour and general mayhem with actual useful nudity and the clever use of over-the-top profanity.

OK, this is the movie I’m seeing in my head. This is the movie I WANT to see. In fact, this may well be the movie I want to make. If you’re going to do a movie like this, go ALL OUT! Half-assing it is the worst thing you can do with the concept. And yet, this movie totally half-asses it. And it kills me. And it kills this movie. Samaire Armstrong is absolutely gorgeous, one of the hottest women in movies right now, and I assume that Kevin Zegers is some kind of gorgeous up-and-coming boy toy for the ladies. But that alone can’t be a reason to watch. And this movie doesn’t give you any other reason. So…don’t watch.

Walk All Over Me is a Canadian film starring Leelee Sobieski and Tricia Helfer.  You can tell it’s Canadian by Minute Four, and you can tell nothing cool is going to happen by Minute Nine.  And you can tell you regret renting it by Minute Eleven.  And you can stop watching it right then and there.  The premise of the movie is that Leelee Sobieski is Alberta, a hot small-town teenage girl who runs away from home after getting into trouble with some thugs.  She runs to Vancouver, where she decides to hide out with Celine (Tricia Helfer), who is either a friend or a relative.  Or something.  Celine, you see, is a dominatrix.  And I know the nerds out there are excited already.  Tricia Helfer?  Dominatrix?  Yes…yes…and they are hosting Battlestar Galactica marathons in order to prepare themselves to watch this.

But you know what?  Tricia Helfer does not get naked.  Leelee Sobieski becomes a dominatrix too, but she also does not get naked.  Then why bother having the “dominatrix” theme in the movie at all?  Because it means that this way Sobieski gets to spend the entire movie in fishnets and cleavage-boosting bustiers and spiked heels on CFM boots.  And it also means that much of the film will take place in weird rooms, and people “not knowing what that weird helmet is for” becomes the standard punchline to jokes that were never told.  But there is almost no actual dominatrix action whatsoever, it’s just the clothes that appear in the film.  Which would be fine if you were making a porno, but this movie takes itself almost seriously.

It’s one of those crime capers where bad guys are after a good guy because they believe he stole some money, and bad guys capture good guys, and new guys get involved, and new guys capture bad guys, and bad guys trade good guys with new guys.  One of those.  But Canadian.  Obviuously Canadian.  And therefore painfully boring and not too good.  Perhaps the idea was that putting Sobieski and Helfer in boob-showing shirts and fishnets and short skirts and hooker boots would distract people from the lack of plot, the poor acting and the senseless story.  And, in a way, that DID actually work on me.  After all, how many times have I mentioned it in this review alone?  And the clothes and girls DID keep me watching past the eleven minute mark.  But by then I had seen everything, and I wished I had turned it off.  So there’s my advice to you.  Eleven minutes in.  Turn this off and watch a fishing show.

When I bought my Blu-Ray player, almost a year ago, it came with 5 free Blu-Ray movies.  I had to fill out a little card checking off the movies I might like, and they would be shipped to my house.  Because it was almost a year ago, there weren’t many movies out on Blu-Ray yet.  So although I could grab Full Metal Jacket and The Prestige, the others were a crap-shoot, so I just picked the three I hadn’t seen.  One of those was S.W.A.T.  I think.  I can’t really remember.  In fact, I had completely forgotten I had ever placed this order, since it took eight months for it to arrive.  And when it did, it came with a not saying there had been a “slight delay” in shipping because one of the titles I had requested was no longer being made and they had to replace it with something else.  And maybe that something was S.W.A.T.  I sure hope I didn’t order it on purpose.

And that’s why the movie, although it’s old, merits a review.  Because people who are loving the Blu-Ray technology are buying up everything they can on that medium.  Every movie that’s out there on Blu-Ray gets serious consideration from the owners of the players.  And I am writing this to warn those of you who may want to purchase all these films to avoid SWAT.  At all costs.  It doesn’t matter one bit how good it looks on your TV, it is a giant waste of your time.  Yet another vehicle for Colin Farrell to play an Irish tough guy, SWAT concerns the LAPD SWAT team, the “toughest, meanest, best, coolest, heaviest, deadliest, most powerful, most bad-ass, most attractive fighting force in the world”.  Or something.

Colin Farrell, Michelle Rodriguez, LL Cool J, Samuel L. Jackson, and some other chumps train to be SWAT.  Farrell is getting a second chance at the team, one that comes after a dust-up with his out-of-control former SWAT team-mate.  I wonder if that preamble will be referenced later?  Of course it will!  For the first hour of the movie, the team trains.  And then they pass their course.  Much to the chagrin of their captain, who hates them!  We also get to see the evil antics of some foreign bad-guy.  He might be a drug dealer, or a human trafficker, or  a counterfeiter or a distributor of fake Faberge Eggs.  We have no idea.  We just know he’s evil, because he kills folks, and he will obviously eventually be the guy who faces off against the SWAT team.

So after an hour plus of six guys looking tough, talking tough, flexing and posing and saying bad-ass things to each other while wearing mad-cool sunglasses, there is actually…the plot!  Of the movie!  Which involves the entire city attacking the SWAT team, who respond by looking tough, talking tough, flexing and posing and saying bad-ass things to other people while wearing mad-cool sunglasses.  There is actually no story in the film, no compelling character, no single scene that’s cool enough to justify the action portions of the film…no reason at all to watch this hunk of junk.

The Walker is a movie that knows exactly what it wants to be.  It knows exactly where it’s going, exactly how to get there, and exactly how long it’s going to take.  But that’s kind of like saying the same of a Michael Bolton album.  Sure, he made the exact album he wanted to make, but why in God’s name would anyone want to listen?  And in the same way, I can’t understand why people would want to watch The Walker.  Well, the cast in impressive.  Woody Harrelson, Lily Tomlin, Lauren Bacall and Kristen Scott Thomas.  Which might get some people to rent this film.  But I can’t see it getting them to like it once they have done so.

Harrelson plays a gay man in Washington who doesn’t seem to do much except hang out with the society ladies and play canasta, gossiping about everything tawdry that goes on around him.  He is referred to as a “walker”, a man who walks around with rich women.  I don’t know if these people actually exist, or are referred to as such, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter.  Harrelson has this fake southern accent which is disconcerting at best, obnoxious at worst.  He comes off as a gossipy cross between Truman Capote and Scarlett O’Hara, which is not a character I thought we ever needed to see.  His friendship with these women is a shallow one, based almost entirely on surface appearances.  His life outside his gossip-sewing circle is also shallow and surface-deep.  This is what we learn in the first half hour.

And that first half hour, as with the rest of the film, is meticulously planned out and executed.  Soon, Harrelson is driving Kristen Scott Thomas to visit the man with whom she is having an extra-marital affair.  When she finds that man murdered, a vague plot is exposed.  A vague plot, involving vague motives, featuring vague power players in Washington with a vague denouement and a vague resolution.  Shadowy figures pass through the scene, old friends turn out not to really be friends, and Harrelson takes a vague stand based on some vague morals and some vague motivations, which seems to basically involve him being vaguely questioned by vaguely politically motivated cops.

You get the sense that this film is vague?  Well, it is.  Nothing concrete ever really happens, certainly nothing exciting happens, and although the narrative is pretty straightforward, the movie barely scratches the surface of what surely is meant to be a very complex political murder plot.  There is just not enough here to interest people, and on top of that, you have Woody Harrelson playing the central role, one which is just plain irritating.  Skip The Walker.

I had the most masochistic morning of my life today.  I watched, back to back, The Hottie and the Nottie, the Paris Hilton crapfest, followed by Blonde Ambition, the Jessica Simpson crapfest.  You see, I was working out and didn’t really want to put on a movie for which I would actually have to take notes.  Or one that I would actually care about.  And I decided to review the two together, because in many ways, they are the same movie.

 The plot of The Hottie and the Nottie is that Paris Hilton is hot.  She is apparently the hottest chick in the city…Los Angeles?  I think?  And every guy who sees her either falls over, or spills his drink on himself, or crashes his car.  HILARIOUS!  She appears in the film for the first time jogging down a beach.  Paris Hilton, perhaps the worst actress alive, can’t even JOG convincingly.  And some creepy guy stalks her, because he was in love with her when he was six.  Or something.  And she has this ugly friend, and she won’t date until her ugly friend does, so this guy has to figure out how to get her friend a date…and people fall down and spill their drinks and…blahblahblah.  Of course, the ugly friend is clearly just made up to look ugly, and we know that by the end of the film she’ll be reasonably attractive, if not actually hot.  But then, I never got to the end of the movie.  The cable came out of the back of the TV when the ugly girl was starting to get more attractive and Paris Hilton was starting to irritate me so much that I didn’t get off the rowing machine to plug the cables back in.  I just enjoyed the silence.  By the time I was done, so too was the movie.  And the end of this piece of trash will always remain a mystery to me.  And happily so.

I actually managed to stick it out all the way through Blonde Ambition.  Mostly because it’s background noise, and background noise is OK for when you’re excercising.  At least it is not specifically irritating the way The Hottie and the Nottie is.  Which is why it gets one star.  Bringing the total number of stars for these two piles of crap to…one.  Jessica Simpson, just like Paris Hilton, has only one thing to do in this film - be hot.  As she walks around, guys stare.  And they fall down, they spill drinks on themselves, they crash cars…the film itself is basically a remake of 1988’s Working Girl, which gave the world Melanie Griffith, making her a star.  Since then, Melanie Griffith has become a bizarre casualty of plastic surgery, with the world’s biggest, weirdest lips.  The only person close is…Jessica Simpson.  In this movie.  At least in this film there are other actors with her.  Real ones.  Rachel Leigh Cook, Luke Wilson, and Willie Nelson, who somehow shows up in every Jessica Simpson movie.  But that does not save this junk.  People fall down holes, Jessica Simpson burps and farts and wears trucker hats - get it?  She’s CRASS!  She can’t ride a bike well.  Hahahahahahahahahaha.  And she’s trying to make it in the cutthroat world of New York.  That should be good for some jokes.  But it isn’t.

 And here’s the thing - neither one of them is hot enough.  Jessica Simpson comes close, but she has these gigantic mandrill-ass lips that really distract from any prettiness her face may contain.  And Paris Hilton most definitely is not hot enough to be in a movie where being hot is the only character trait her character has.  Neither one can act, neither one has talent, neither one should ever be in movies, and both these movies suck.  And - both bombed miserably at the box office.  In fact, both of them were, as much as possible, kept out of the theatres by the studios, because they knew they would be ridiculed.  Even so, both these movies opened in theatres, and both made less than $30,000.  The Hottie and the Nottie averaged $249.00 per theatre.  Total.  111 theatres, $27,000.  Blonde Ambition averaged $165.00 per theatre on opening weekend.  It ended up playing in 8 theatres, and made $6,000.  And deservedly so, as both are among the worst movies ever made.

Hero Wanted is a rather painful experience.  I like Ray Liotta, who is a pretty solid, you-get-what-you-expect B-Movie actor.  Unfortunately, with Cuba Gooding Jr. you also get what you expect.  And, from him, I expect absolute crap.  Every movie this guy’s been in since Boyz N The Hood, he’s been just awful.  He seems to be that rare actor that gets worse with every passing year and project.  His finest acting performance may well have been in one of those MacGyver episodes when he was a teenager.  (Ironically, that chick who played Blossom - Mayim Bialik - also did her best work on MacGyver.)  And in Hero Wanted, Gooding is predictably putrid and unconvincing as a man on a quest for vengeance.  This is basically the same role that has been played by some very good actors in recent years -Jodie Foster, Kevin Bacon, and of course Charles Bronson.

 Speaking of Charles Bronson, there was a movie made about eight years ago called Boondock Saints (a far better movie), in which the two main characters, played by Sean Patrick Flannery and Norman Reedus, make reference a few times to Charles Bronson.  It’s the way Boondock Saints tipped it’s hat to the Bronson revenge fantasy flicks that preceded it, movies that clearly had an influence on the film.  Now here comes Hero Wanted, and where is the tip of the hat to Bronson?  Or for that matter, to Boondock Saints?  As it turns out, this movie is, throughout it’s hour-and-a-half running time, completely ripping off Boondock Saints.  Here’s how.

The guy starring with Gooding?  Norman Reedus from Boondock Saints.  Maybe the film makers thought that his involvement was in itself a big enough hat-tip.  It isn’t.  Ray Liotta plays an unusually smart and literate cop who makes amazing leaps in logic to close in on the real killer, all the while talking down to his subordinates and sending them out to get him coffee when they say something stupid.  Just like Willem Dafoe does in Boondock Saints.  He begins to feel empathy for, and identify with, the vigilante, just like Dafoe.  Cuba Gooding becomes, through some strange circumstances, a vigilante out for vengeance, just like Reedus and Flannery in Boondock Saints.  The director (first-timer Brian Smrz) loves the camera shot that goes around the characters in a sweeping circle, the kind of shot made popular by…Boondock Saints.  The big finale features a surprise appearance by an ex-marine badass killing machine, and every character has two guns, just like the big finale in Boondock Saints.  The killing scenes are shown piece by piece, where the scene begins, then they cut away, then the cops show up to piece it together, then we see how the scene plays out.  Just like in Boondock Saints.  The list goes on.

The movie starts with Cuba Gooding at a bar, playing an unconvincing drunk.  His drinking problem is easily explained away with the old quick, trite explanation.  Dead wife and unborn child, nothing to live for, and so on and so forth.  Then we see him working as a garbage man with Norman Reedus as a partner, when out of nowhere a car crash happens right in front of them.  Gooding jumps into the car and saves the little girl trapped inside, while the car burns.  He becomes an instant hero.  It’s the only good thing he’s done with his life…and so forth.  But he’s still a messed up weirdo, and he becomes obsessed with a girl who works as a bank teller.  When he approaches her, and the bank is robbed, she gets shot in the head.  He goes a little nuts, and tracks down the robbers one by one, in a quest for vengeance.  The fact that he knows who the robbers are and the police don’t gives away the ending right away, but I’ll leave out the quirky little details in case someone actually wants to see Gooding struggle his way through this painful movie.

Not only is Cuba Gooding Jr. unconvincing as a vigilante, he is also pretty bad at it.  He seems to need to deliver that one, last, tough-guy line before he kills someone, which gives them a chance to avoid death and fight him before he (obviously) eventually comes out on top.  As Eli Wallach said in The Good The Bad And The Ugly, “if you’re going to shoot, shoot!  Don’t talk!”  And the ending is ridiculous and implausible in virtually every way.  The more emotional and heartwrenching the ending tries to be, the more I laughed.  By the time Gooding inexplicably gets the girl, I was in stitches, pausing the movie several times because my sides hurt.  It’s almost worth watching just for that kind of hilarity.  But it isn’t.  Stay far away from this garbage.

If a line like “that’s not my ringtone” scares you, you might enjoy One Missed Call.  Then again, if “that’s not my ringtone” scares you, you really need to watch The Exorcist.  Or Alien.  Or Night of the Living Dead.  Because you are missing out on life, I think.  Cell phones are, try as they might in this film, not scary.  They are not even slightly fearsome.  They are just cell phones.  At best, they’re irritating.  The premise in the movie is that people are dying.  As they tend to do in horror movies.  Before they die, they get a voicemail message on their cell phones from the person who just died.  But it’s their own voice!  And that voice is scared.  And screaming.  And the message is dated at the exact time and date that they are scheduled to die.  Now, if you heard yourself say “if only I could get my head screwed on straight” at the exact time you’re scheduled to die, wouldn’t you really, REALLY avoid using that phrase?  Just a thought.

So these people know they’re going to die, but of course the main character can somehow figure out the mystery of where this evil comes from and why these kids specifically have been targeted.  None of it really makes any sense.  As Shannyn Sossamon gets the ear of sympathetic cop Edward Burns, the two of them are racing against the clock because you see…she got the call too!  Which leads to a final showdown in an…abandoned hospital.  Come on people.  Let’s stop using abandoned hospitals as creepy locations in horror movies, shall we?  Has the concept not played itself out by now?  How about an abandoned 4-H club, or an abandoned cardboard box factory?  We’re done with hospitals.  At least I am.  Then the final FINAL scare, because you know that there has to be another twist and another scare and another death before it’s all over.  Blah blah blah.  This is a remake of the genuinely chilling Japanese film of the same name, directed ably by the Japanese horror master Takashi Miike, who is one of the best in the world.  This film does not live up to his standard.

At least the star of the film is attractive, in a  Denise-from-the-Cosby-Show sort of way.  Shannyn Sossamon is gorgeous, and has a great story - one that is far better than the one in the movie.  She was discovered by a Hollywood casting director while DJing at a Hollywood party.  Figuring she looked a lot like Angelina Jolie (and she does - she is a cross between Jolie and Lisa Bonet from the Cosby Show), she was thrust into a starring role opposite Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale, a film that was designed to make stars of both actors.  It worked for Ledger in a big way, although the film itself didn’t fare particularly well.  And it worked a little for Sossamon, who next got a star turn in 40 Days And 40 Nights with Josh Hartnett.  But since then, she has been working in low-rent horror flicks like this one.  Don’t rent this or buy it or glance at it for free.  Instead, here are some pictures.  Who does Shannyn Sossamon resemble more?  Angelina Jolie or Lisa Bonet?

The idea of Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson acting together in a movie is an appealing one. Two titans of the movie world now come together in a buddy comedy about two guys who want to do everything they’ve never done before they die. Still appealing. They skydive and drive race cars. This is starting to get less appealing…The Bucket List is a half-way decent concept with some truly amazing actors, but it just doesn’t work. Yes, Freeman and Nicholson are terrific together, and they both do what they can with the material they are given. But great acting does not make up for poor writing. The poor writing is most obvious when the narration begins. Morgan Freeman, with his wonderful voice is of course the narrator, we would assume from beyond the grave. And somehow, this reminded me most of The Shawshank Redemption, the last movie I watched narrated by Morgan Freeman. (Well, March of the Penguins, too. But he didn’t star in that.)

And clearly The Bucket List has absolutely nothing in common with The Shawshank Redemption, except for Morgan Freeman. But I was constantly aware, every time Freeman began talking, that he was in a sub-par movie. He and Nicholson end up together in the hospital in adjacent beds, and become friendly with one another. Freeman is a career mechanic with a large family - wife, kids, grandkids. Nicholson is a bachelor billionnaire, and he owns the hospital. He has a toadying assistant, played by Sean Hayes (that flaming guy from Will and Grace), who gives a pretty solid performance. In fact, Nicholson’s relationship with Hayes is far more interesting and well done than the one he has with Freeman.

Soon after meeting, both Freeman and Nicholson are diagnosed with terminal cancer, and given six months or a year to live. So they break out of the hospital and go on a round-the-world trip to do everything they ever wanted to do before they “kick the bucket”. Hence - The Bucket List. At least Nicholson scoffs at the title, mocking it’s cutesy nature. And at the very least they get the old-guys-doing-extreme-sports thing out of the way early on. Get it - they’re skydiving, but they’re old! That in itself is supposed to be funny. It isn’t. What then follows is scene after scene of the two of them talking about life, ruminating on existence atop the pyramids, the Great Wall of China, beside the Taj Mahal, and so forth.

The basic premise of this movie, as it so obviously will be from the start, is that the journey the two undertake will change them profoundly. Freeman will get a chance, through Nicholson and his money, to experience a world beyond that which he has lived his whole life. And Nicholson will learn, through Freeman, the value of human kindness and love for one’s fellow man. This will of course lead to a heartwarming scene where Jack sets aside his rich-guy, arrogant maniac pride, and visits his estranged daughter. Now, it might seem as though I am giving away the ending here, that this is a spoiler. But it’s fairly obvious right from the start that this is what is going to happen. I knew this from watching the trailers.

In the end, The Bucket List is worth watching only for Freeman and Nicholson. The two of them are just magnetic, and they are well worth watching in just about anything. And The Bucket List is just about anything. It is a poor movie, it is badly written and so painfully obvious throughout, but people are going to watch this because of the names at the top of the marquee. And those names really do make it almost worthwhile.