Jan 10, 2008,
Dre Rivas
Old timers Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman break out the walkers and kick around The Bucket List this weekend. They'll be jumping out of airplanes and getting in touch with their inner beings and stuff before they croak. Now the prospect of having Nicholson and Freeman on the screen together is interesting, but what would it be like with two other golden oldies? I took a few other old geezer pairings and wondered what they'd look like in The Bucket List:
Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy
See them in: Cocoon
This real life couple was insanely lovable. But here's the problem with this famous pairing: they were always like 1,000 years old. Does anybody ever remember Tandy being young? I don't see her pulling off the parachute jump. It'd be like Mr. Glass falling down those subway steps. Hume Cronyn is one tough S.O.B., though. I wouldn't want to get in a brawl with that guy, even in his later, scrawnier days.
Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas
See them in: Tough Guys
Lancaster was always pretty spry in his later years and Kirk Douglas, stroke or not, is still of sound mind and kicking it. I think a Bucket List movie with these guys would definitely have worked like twenty years ago. They knew each other well enough that they'd be pretty good at giving each other crap on screen. I would have paid to see this one.
Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau
See them in: The Odd Couple
This here is a no-brainer. Lemmon and Matthau worked together a bunch of times to great effect. Even in poor efforts like The Front Page that great chemistry seeped through. These cats were up to their old shenanigans basically up until the time of their deaths. They were pretty active folk and a fairly successful box office pairing up through the mid-'90s. I'm actually shocked a movie like this never happened between these two.
Honorable Mention:
Mel Gibson and Danny Glover
See them in: Lethal Weapon
Gibson and Glover are getting up there in years. Hell, Glover's been saying he's "too old for this s---" since the '80s. I don't expect there's many Lethal Weapon sequel scripts headed their way but that doesn't mean we had our fill of the Gibson-Glover magic.
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Dre writes three times a week for Film.com. Email him!
