A four-hanky codgerfest that’s supposedly about the ennobling gravitas of impending mortality, “The Bucket List” put me in mind of a bucket, all right: the one in “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.”

Recall, if you will, Mr. Creosote (Terry Jones), the fantastically obese diner at the fancy French restaurant, where John Cleese’s maître d’ greets him with faux-obsequious flourish:

Maître d’: Ah, good afternoon, sir; and how are we today?

Mr. Creosote: Better…

Maître d’: Better?

Mr. Creosote: Better get a bucket.

Unfortunately, as a commentary on Rob Reiner’s saccharine sop to aging Baby Boomers, that’s perfectly apt. Top-billed Jack Nicholson plays a billionaire businessman who has made his loot gobbling up failing hospitals for his health care empire before falling prey to his own penny-pinching management when he contracts a terminal brain tumor. Mr. Nicholson’s cranky, 70-something sybarite, Edward Cole, can’t take a private room because it would be a public relations disaster: He’s forbidden them in his fussbudget hospital franchises. So he winds up in a bed next to a salt-of-the-earth mechanic named Carter Chambers (Morgan Freeman). Though these men come from vastly different tax brackets, it gradually becomes apparent that they have more than cancer in common.

While the screenplay sets our patients up for their inevitable last chance man-date, establishing the literary soul beneath Chambers’s grease-stained overalls and the hungry heart lurking behind Cole’s aging swinger façade, we are treated to the sight of Mr. Nicholson parading about in his hospital gown. He looks like a sack of potatoes with a five-day stubble. It’s an encore exhibition, since America already spied his fat, hairy bottom in Nancy Meyers’s “Something’s Gotta Give.” At this rate, will Mr. Nicholson soon be sharing a prison cell with the equally indiscreet Harvey Keitel as, say, a pair of geriatric jewel thieves, coming to grips with their dark, unspoken passion? If so, please save it for the French.

The actor’s reverse vanity peaks as Edward undergoes painful chemotherapy treatment and pays multiple trips to the bathroom to vomit. It turns out, however, that the bucket of the title is a metaphor, not a receptacle. It refers to the phrase “kick the bucket.” And before Edward and Carter do that, these unlikely buddies decide to make a list of things they want to experience first (or, perhaps, last), such as “Kiss the most beautiful woman in the world” or “Witness something majestic.” Look out for the special hour of “Oprah!” dedicated to instructing audiences on drawing up their own bucket lists.

After he recovers his strength, Edward drags a reluctant Carter loose from his distraught wife and off on a globetrotting spree of fantasy adventures: skydiving, car racing, pyramid climbing. It’s one epic American Express commercial — with leaky catheters. Along their journey, Messrs. Nicholson and Freeman ease into the cozy, seven-figure pockets of their most common character types. It’s become impossible to remember the last time Mr. Freeman had a challenging role. He’s the same persona he played in “Driving Miss Daisy” and “The Shawshank Redemption,” that of the humble, sage-like black man working out of a Sancho Panza mode. Mr. Nicholson is the rake without apology, who nonetheless has character flaws he is finally driven to confront and transcend (see: “About Schmidt,” “Something’s Gotta Give,” “As Good As It Gets,” etc).

The movie, which is narrated by Mr. Freeman’s character in that warm, knowing, avuncular tone he wields like a hot toddy and an heirloom quilt, toys with viewer expectations. The opening scene is of a lone climber trudging up a snowy mountainside toward a peak, as we hear about the glorious fulfillment Edward enjoyed at his death. Who is the climber? And why is he climbing alone? Stay tuned for the “gotcha!” ending if you must, but remember: That’s an hour you will never get back. Since Mr. Reiner stoops to cliché, I will too: Choose life this holiday season, and pass the “Bucket.” Mr. Creosote needs it.