Anger Management

What's the Plot?

One of life's put-upon souls, Dave Buznik (Adam Sandler) is as mild-mannered as you can get. Since his childhood, everyone has bullied or walked over him in some fashion or other and an embarrassing moment infront of his local neighbourhood when he was a child has left him afraid of public displays of affection. All that is about to change when a misunderstanding aboard a business flight spirals out of control and Dave finds himself in court accused of attacking an air stewardess in a case of air rage. The judge orders Dave to attend some anger management sessions run by Doctor Buddy Rydell (Jack Nicholson). Upon his arrival, Dave finds that the course is full of highly eccentric and volatile men and women - Chuck (John Turturro) who is assigned to be his "anger ally" and Nate and Lou (Jonathan Loughran and Louis Guzman) who both have "issues" with everyone. However, Buddy diagnoses that Dave is a dangerous individual and needs round-the-clock therapy putting pressure on him from all aspects of his life from work through to his girlfriend, Linda (Marisa Tomei). Will Dave finally snap at Buddy's unorthodox treatments or can he control his "supposed" inner demons - especially since Buddy seems to be hitting on Linda !

The Review

Great comedy acts nearly all seem to have the following common denominator - one funny guy and one straight guy. Anger Management luckily has this equation but not in the sense that you would expect. Sandler, who should be the funny man out of the cast, surprisingly has the more dead-pan role compared to his co-stars. Turturro, who steals the show in such films as The Big Lebowski, gets the most screen time out of the odd-ball's from the class and is a true gem as a psycho whose ready to explode at the slightest thing and manages to upgrade Dave from an "air stewardess-hitter" to a "blind man- beater" in just one night of socialising.

The true comedian of the piece is Nicholson who gets the chance to combine parts of his more humourless roles into one quirky character. The charming womaniser (The Witches Of Eastwick); the deranged individual (Batman); the extreme personality swings (As Good As It Gets); all these equal the weird, wacky but wonderful Buddy Rydell. From stopping the car on a packed bridge to get his patient to sing "I feel pretty" to alleviate stress, to asking Dave's boss, Mr. Head, if his first name is Dick, through to throwing his breakfast plate across the room and then patiently asking Dave why he thinks he just did that, Nicholson gets the prime cuts from the comedy animal. Sandler isn't bad by any means, it's just that his character isn't that far removed from all the others that he's brought to the screen which, even though there's the phrase "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", the other one along the lines of "flogging a dead horse" comes to mind - especially to the UK audience.

When Nicholson isn't on screen, the film does tend to flounder somewhat despite some nice cameo's - John McEnroe, Woody Harrelson - but you've got to question the strength of what appears to be a well-loaded comedy that gets it's biggest laughs from a tremendously fat cat dressed up in designer clothes that Sandler's character has been working on! Good, but not good enough to get him into the UK movie goers' hearts.

STEVE'S SCORE