The Life List (2025) Netflix Movie Review

It felt good seeing Sophia Carson again as she came through with this one titled The Life List. So this is like a bucket list, but with strings attached. Here, we see a character, Alex Rose, who is sent by her mother her on a quest to complete her childhood bucket list, it takes her on a journey that will uncover family secrets, find romance and maybe discover herself along the way.

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Sypnosis

So the synopsis pretty much sums up the entire movie. We follow Sophia Carson as Alex as she slowly works her way through the list of life goals that she had made as a teenager. The catch is, though, in order for her to get this prize promised by her mom, Alex has to complete them all within the year.

And the time constraint could make this somewhat tense, but it's not really the point of the storytelling. So while there is a deadline, it's not something that she's racing against to fulfill. This is a cute film and a cute story, but like a lot of modern storytelling, we're rushed into the characters, given very brief voiceover exposition that only really provides superficial introductions and backgrounds.

Even with Alex, the character that we are meant to know the most about, she's not well developed. At least, through her going over her list multiple times for us, that we couldn't remember what they were, we do learn about her as the story progresses. But she has a few siblings.
Honestly, they're so generic and forgettable that I never even remembered their names or if they were actually siblings, spouses or maybe friends. And there's such a lack of introduction that outside of like five people, the rest of them are absolute strangers.

The movie is shown to us in sort of a series of short vignettes. We'll watch some scenes and then be shown a title screen that lets us know we've moved on to another month. This helps a bit with expediency, but not very much. These glimpses into her progress, they really could help the flow to be efficient and maintain a decent momentum.

While this does keep its forward pace, the adverse effect is that the majority of Alex's list is just lost in the shuffle. And even when a story element is more important than another, like, say, going back to teaching versus getting a tattoo, we don't really need to watch her ponder over which design she's going to have inked. But you would expect that the teaching aspect would get a bunch of focus just thanks to how rich of a storytelling potential it has.

That's not what we get. We get cursory peeks into her teaching progress and it ends up short changing these particular arcs. With the teaching scenario, one of our students is a challenge for her and we see the two characters just butt heads, but only in about 30 second clips.

Then when the film decides to reach its conclusion, the teaching arc is wrapped up with just about zero reasoning. This is only one example of several where the movie doesn't really understand where it wants to put the focus and then dedicate actual depth to a plot point. But I don't want to ignore the fact that at small times within the movie, we do get to see some palpable emotion from certain characters.

Key moments find their target and they hit it square on. And if the writing could have focused less on adding so many items to Alex's list and instead honed in on the three most intriguing and investing arcs, the storytelling would have been way more impactful.

I'd mentioned before that there is a romance angle to it and it works in a sweet and cutesy way. It's terribly obvious, but that's not a sticking point because I was actually rooting for the relationship right from the start. Kyle Allen and Sebastian de Souza play two people in Alex's life that have an impact on her journey. Each of them brings a lot of charm to their characters with wit, intelligence, even care.

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And Connie Britton plays Alex's mom. She is warm and inviting. You can just feel the love oozing from her as she talks to her daughter, just encouraging her and rooting her on, but also not sugarcoating certain aspects so that it dissuades Alex from her list.

Despite the lack of depth on the characters and the shallow attention to some key storylines, I did find myself engaged with this and enjoying most of the performances. I think what kept me around the longest was just wanting to see the outcome of her relationships. Even though I knew it was obvious, because Alex could be an antagonist to herself. So self-sabotaging something is still a possibility.

While Sophia Carson is endearing in the lead role and supported by a few strong performances, the life list adds way too much to its plate, leaving each story element to flounder and be forgotten. A few key arcs had the potential to be emotionally moving, but the constant use of vignettes as storytelling devices removes just about all of the impact a storyline contains, which is also surprising for a film that's just over two hours long.

I think there's a meaningful drama hidden somewhere amongst the fluff and the distractions, but it takes too much sifting to get to those parts. I give The life list 5 out of 10. This isn't terrible by any means, but it could be so much better.