Bucket List, The

New York Post Kyle Smith

Actors tell us that dying is easy, comedy is hard. But comedies about dying are hardest of all.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The movie's sincerity helps it get over some of the most difficult hurdles and the feeling after leaving theater is one of having experienced something worthwhile albeit unremarkable.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

The leads, who were born six weeks apart in 1937, have remarkable hare-and-tortoise chemistry.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray

There are certainly worse ways to spend the holiday season than in the company of two charming old actors, being reminded that human companionship makes life worth living, even as it makes dying a little tougher.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Despite some emotional dips and a see-it-to-believe-it load of schmaltz at the end, The Bucket List is mostly a joy ride with good company, and the actors obviously were having a high time on their traveling boondoggle.

Empire Angie Errigo

The script is weak and obvious and the direction disappointingly unimaginative. But stars are stars, and the old boys are terrific - enough to make this a funny and sometimes moving buddy picture.

Variety Todd McCarthy

A feel-good film about death, a sitcom about mortality, "Ikiru" for meatheads. It's also a picture about two cancer patients confronting reality, and deciding how they want to spend their presumed last days, that has not an ounce of reality about it.

Village Voice Julia Wallace

Turns out The Bucket List is a meta-film, mostly about how these two legendary actors interact and what it means to be an actor in your own life.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

The movie has its moments, and some are undeniably affecting. But even those seem artificial, relying far too much on our familiarity with and fondness for the film's stars.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Emotionally false.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Crust

Freeman and Nicholson make the most of Justin Zackham's script, but there just isn't enough substance behind their characters to prop up the carpe diem platitudes. The result is a semi-comedic, geriatric "Brokeback Mountain" minus the sex and with a Himalayan summit.

Portland Oregonian M. E. Russell

Freeman and Nicholson mostly stand in front of special-effects green screens and have the locales projected, like they're in a "Road" picture.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

In The Bucket List, Nicholson is human-ish. And Freeman is so human.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

Feels every bit as cheap and flimsy as Edward's hospital.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Nothing wrong about a movie that says, Stop and smell the roses. Now, if only director Rob Reiner hadn't rubbed our noses in a bouquet of plastic blooms.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Director Rob Reiner is betting that their star power alone will blind us to the holes in this cheesecloth of a script. It proves a fool's bet – no star shines that brightly.

The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen

You'd think the team of Rob Reiner, Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman might have had the right stuff. Alas, their labored efforts fail to lift The Bucket List out of its flatlining state.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

Fails its stars in fundamental ways. Mr. Nicholson has played wealthy rogues before (most recently in “Something’s Gotta Give”), but this particular bon vivant is unsalvageably repellent.

The New Yorker David Denby

The Bucket List will quickly be kicked into oblivion, but, at a lifetime-achievement-award ceremony, Nicholson’s tempest will fit nicely into a montage of Crazy Jack moments.

Time Richard Corliss

This movie exists wholly in the realm of metaphor, whose messages stick out like placards: Find joy through pain. Reunite with estranged loved ones. Keep hope alive.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

The first thing to say about The Bucket List is that Rob Reiner is the rare director who can take all the wonder out of one of the seven wonders of the world.

Chicago Tribune Sid Smith

A manipulative look at dying with dignity and a lame yarn about as realistic as the fantasy in “The Princess Bride.”

USA Today Claudia Puig

The entire undertaking feels like a waste of time and talent.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

The Bucket List is a movie for oldsters that, paradoxically, looks as if it was made for 15-year-olds. If this is what is meant in Hollywood as "thinking outside the box," then it's time to get a new box.

Austin Chronicle Josh Rosenblatt

White-bread storytelling made by, for, and about people who think joy and meaning can be acquired by simply taking a step or two out of life’s comfort zones and into African-safari packages and skydiving excursions.

Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar

Edward and Carter are like the original Odd Couple, except nobody’s laughing.

Washington Post John Anderson

The overall sense, however, is of a movie coasting on an obvious and somewhat flimsy premise, to which no one thought to bring much else besides Nicholson and Freeman.

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

Director Rob Reiner’s atrocious cancer “comedy” marks a new low in Hollywood’s self-flagellating “things to be thankful for” tradition.

Premiere Aaron Hillis

This terminally ill, terminally awful dramedy marks a sad cinematic milestone: The Bucket List is the first film in history to feature a truly wretched Nicholson performance -- and we're not talking about the character he plays.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

A movie about two old codgers who are nothing like people, both suffering from cancer that is nothing like cancer, and setting off on adventures that are nothing like possible.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Rob Reiner's feel-good tear-jerker, in which dying well is the best revenge, wants to be heartwarming. But first-timer Justin Zackham's screenplay is so stridently formulaic and disingenuous that the film falls flat at every inspirational turn.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

The most insipidly innocuous film ever made about facing mortality and living it up before passing away, The Bucket List has as much poetry and poise as its clumsy, clunky title.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Any moron can make a bad movie. But it takes a special breed of schemer to make a picture as shameless as The Bucket List.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

I don't know if Rob Reiner is the one to blame for this atrocity, but he directed and coproduced.