An uplifting film about two geezers with incurable cancers was always going to be a risky proposition in danger of shattering the test tubes instead of producing cinematic gold. The Bucket List stars Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman and their mere presence tempts director Rob Reiner to plug them in their preferred screen personas rather than use them to dig deeper in its tricky subject matter. Freeman is solemn dignity itself, echoing his signature roles in The Shawshank Redemption, The Unforgiven or Million Dollar Baby, even up to the voiceover narration at the beginning of the film; Nicholson is the snide success story who is most entertained when he infuriates others and heavily references his own creations in As Good As It Gets and Something’s Gotta Give. The result is that while Freeman and Nicholson are probably having fun, the audience doesn’t.

Freeman plays Edward Cole who once dreamt of becoming a history professor, but family obligation and a stark economic reality made him an auto mechanic. Nicholson plays Carter Chambers who has made billions, but failed to make a functional and stable family life for himself. Both men have incurable cancer and share a room in a hospital, which Carter happens to own. Putting a billionaire and an auto mechanic in the same room has taken a lot of maneuvering on the part of screenwriter Justin Zackham, none of it very convincing, but I digress. The main thing is that the duo gradually warm up to each other in stages weaved into the plot with depressing precision: from indifference, through tolerance to appreciation. Freeman and Nicholson, both 70, can sleepwalk through this onscreen obstacle course and director Reiner pretty much leaves them to do their stuff.

Once these two become best buddies in despair, they decide to spend the last months of their life visiting Earth’s greatest hits and generally indulging in all sorts of fun stuff boys like, all of this funded by Edward probably as an attempt at random redemption for a lifetime of nastiness. One is tempted to argue that the last thing 70-year-old men with incurable illness would do is go mountain-climbing in the Himalayas or skydiving or racing sports cars, but the movie has its own ideas on the matter. It also accidentally references the nostalgia for years of Hollywood yore when movies were very reluctant to leave the back-lot, and larger-than-life personalities dwarfed everything else onscreen. When Edward and Carter visit the pyramids in Egypt, they look almost embarrassingly fake. The result is that the audience, instead of focusing on the characters, is prompted to seek meagre enjoyment in watching two beloved actors do the same thing they have played countless times, and better. Freeman is a solid rock of wistful nobility, and Nicholson is a ball of nervous energy bouncing off him time and again, but there is nothing original, inspired and ultimately entertaining about this. If Freeman was the jerk of a billionaire and Nicholson was the humble mechanic, now that would have been exciting.