The Bucket List

Corporate billionaire Edward Cole and working class mechanic Carter Chambers are worlds apart. At a crossroads in their lives, they share a hospital room and discover they have two things in common: a desire to spend the time they have left doing everything they ever wanted to do and an unrealized need to come to terms with who they are. Together they embark on the road trip of a lifetime, becoming friends along the way and learning to live life to the fullest, with insight and humor.

Critics largely dismissed the film as manipulative and toothless, finding its terminal-illness premise softened into something too comfortable and crowd-pleasing to land with any real weight. Audiences — skewing older and female — responded far more warmly than reviewers did, and the gap between those two reactions is essentially the whole story of the film's legacy.