Wasted stars, trite script: Kick this 'Bucket'

"The Bucket List" refers to a list of monumental things you must experience before you check out.

"The Bucket List," alas, isn't one of them. On a list of priorities, I'd rank it behind lose 20 pounds, re-gift the fruitcake and take down the lights.

It's pretty much the exercise in boomer iconography the TV ads promise: Jack Nicholson (who's played the devil) and Morgan Freeman (who's played God, twice) in an opposites-attract buddy movie of rigid predictability - irascible fogies become fast friends, then go skydiving and stock-car racing while the soundtrack plays Spencer Davis and Steppenwolf.

And true to form, the movie contains nary a moment that will surprise you, once you absorb the set-up - arrogant tycoon forced to share an oncology ward bunk with blue-collar family guy.

Nicholson is the mega-divorced, stewardess-ravaging globetrotter, Freeman the guy who's been married 40 years and rarely ventures past the auto-body shop where he works.

All of Nicholson's moves here (the shades, the killer grin) are familiar, without being as lovable as they used to be. A scene of tubby Jack emerging from an airplane nook with a young woman after reaffirming his membership in the mile-high club drew audible gasps of horror.

Freeman is covering old ground as well, but does so with more dignity. There is no one better than Freeman at occupying one-half of a mature male friendship - with Tim Robbins in "The Shawshank Redemption," with Clint Eastwood in "Unforgiven" and, particularly, "Million Dollar Baby."

The end-of-the-road fatalism at work in "Baby" is made overt here - these men literally are living under a sentence of death, and the movie's gambit is to turn this situation into both a road movie and a comedy.

For Reiner, the challenge is to make a movie about mortality with screen immortals - indulging the audience's desire to see favorite actors in hallmark roles, while stirring the genuine emotion that would arise from a real story about two dying men.

"The Bucket List" is good at the former, not so good at the latter, and the movie ends up speaking to mortality in ways that Reiner doesn't grasp or anticipate.

It can be disheartening to see an actor as great as Nicholson taking roles that ask so little of him. He's too vital to settle for the legends-at-work schmaltz of this or "Something's Gotta Give," and too good to get his clock cleaned by Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Departed."

The great old lion has at least one good roar left in him. This isn't it. *

Produced by Craig Zada, Neil Meron, Alan Greisman and Rob Reiner, directed by Rob Reiner, written by Justin Zackham, music by Marc Shaiman, distributed by Warner Bros.