Anger Management (2003)
Directed by Peter Segal
After a small misunderstanding aboard an airplane escalates out of control, timid businessman Dave Buznik is ordered by the court to undergo anger management therapy at the hands of specialist Dr. Buddy Rydell. But when Buddy steps up his aggressive treatment by moving in, Dave goes from mild to wild as the unorthodox treatment wreaks havoc with his life.
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What critics compared Anger Management to
More often, Nicholson recalls the Devil in The Witches of Eastwick, alternating velvet swagger, super-avuncular glee, and eye-narrowing menace.
Even Jack Nicholson appears defanged when you compare him with his craziest work in films like The Shining, or mediocre comedies that he's appeared in, such as The Witches of Eastwick.
It's fun to see Sandler sputter, simmer and explode while Nicholson remains eerily calm and composed, speaking in the same diabolically mellow tone of voice he used so effectively when he was wooing Shirley MacLaine in "Terms of Endearment" and seducing Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer in "The Witches of Eastwick."
Jack Nicholson puts a wicked-looking spin on Buddy that reminds of his horny little devil in "The Witches of Eastwick" and Jack Torrance in "The Shining."
He may have already played the devil once, in The Witches of Eastwick, but now that he's a few years older, he looks even more impish and demonic as the puppet-master pulling Sandler's strings.
From his blazingly pissed-off general in A Few Good Men to the psycho in The Shining and the devil himself in The Witches of Eastwick, Nicholson's anger is beautiful and terrible to watch, partly because it's rarely righteous.
The movie tries to mix the buddy-movie feel of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, the raunch-fest of a Farrelly Brothers movie, and the psychological twists of thrillers like The Game.
Dorfman and Segal recognize that, ultimately, they're making an Adam Sandler film, and not "After Hours" or "The Game," two better films that "Anger Management" calls to mind.
"Anger Management" is "Punch-Drunk's" Barry Egan and "The Witches of Eastwick's" Daryl Van Horne thrown into a second-rate cross of "The Game" and a photo negative of "What About Bob?"
The worst of it is that in order to facilitate Sandler's milk-fed vision of the controversy-less world of the privileged male, Anger Management concludes with the revelation that the whole thing was, in fact, an elaborate fiction along the lines of Fincher's The Game--a conceit that in this context speaks nothing of cinematic deconstruction and everything of an irredeemable disdain for the intelligence and expectations of its audience.