Anger Management (2003)

Brilliant and touching

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I wished that I had learned something about anger management while watching the film by that name. By the end of the film I was almost angry that I had shelled out six dollars on such a terribly bad film. The previews looked like there was some potential here, and I suppose in the basic premise there was some miniscule amount of potential. Alas, the film did not enough live up to the potential hinted at in the previews.Anger Management stars Adam Sandler as someone who spends most of his time expressing the passive side of a passive/aggressive personality. While on an airplane ride his behaviors are misinterpreted as aggressive and he finds himself facing assault charges in criminal court. What starts out as a huge misunderstanding turns into a sentence of anger management therapy.Enter anger management guru, Buddy Rydell, as played by Jack Nicholson. Frankly, the whole idea of Jack Nicholson as an anger management therapist is pretty funny in and of itself. If you've seen Nicholson going ballistic in Five Easy Pieces, bellowing "here's Johnny" in The Shining, snarling "you can't handle the truth" in A Few Good Men, or taking over the asylum in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest you know what I'm talking about. Alas, the idea is funnier than the realization, and in the end Nicholson is a great talented wasted on a mediocre story.There are a few bright spots in the film, the best of which is Marisa Tomei as Adam Sandler's girlfriend. I saw part of My Cousin Vinny again recently, and found myself thinking that she actually deserved the Oscar she got for her role in that film. She is a gifted actress and she lights up the screen in almost every scene she is in here. Unfortunately, those scenes are too few to salvage the uninspired story. John Turturro has a few good scenes as a psychopath and John C. Reilly has a few inspired moments as a backyard-bully turned Buddhist monk. In the end these few inspired scenes make for enough good material for a not-so-terrible episode of a thirty-minute sitcom (allowing 12 minutes for commercials). There are also a few funny cameos of real-life celebs in the movie, but collectively they fill about two minutes of screen time. The rest of the time is filled with prepubescent humor and stale sight gags stretched way too thin to carry the film across the finish line.My advice is to find someone with some editing equipment and splice together your own clips from films by Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler (think Waterboy meets A Few Good Men). You'll have more fun and the end result couldn't possibly be any worse than this.

Dave Buznik is a businessman who is wrongly sentenced to an anger- management program, where he meets an aggressive instructor. Anger Management boasts lots of laughs and although it gets a bit silly at times it does it's job pretty well and the chemistry between Sandler and Nicholson is great plus the rest of the supporting cast does a pretty great job as well. The story is simple and the jokes do land for the most part and like i said Jack Nicholson is Fantastic as always, this is also one of Adam Sandler's better films and much better performances and i think that even people who might not like him as an actor will find themselves surprised by how good the overall concept and comedy is and how good of a chemistry there is between the 2 leading men.

We all know that some of Adam Sandlers movies can be… well… childish. There's no denying that. And in watching this movie it is easy to see some of that floating around. But, opposite Jack Nicholson, a bit of growth is given to his comedy and it finds a happy medium.I had the benefit of having watched the last half of the movie a while back before today, when I watched it from the beginning. Normally that would hinder ones outlook on the movie – but not this one. I watched today with my boyfriend and my best friend. My best friend and I knew the ending, but my boyfriend had never seen it before. About a half hour in he was staring at the screen with a weird look on his face. When I asked him what was wrong he said something along the lines of "I thought this was supposed to be a realistic type movie… I'm not sure what's going on."Now, my boyfriend is a bright man so I tried to see it from his point of view. That's when the epiphany hit. If I had watched this from beginning to end I would have hated it. I would have thought it was a dumb and dumber rip off only worse. Yet if they had made the movie any differently it would have sucked. Interesting, right?So here's my advice to you. Go find the movie. Rent it, watch it on TV, buy it, whatever. Then before you watch the whole movie, watch just the ending. Then you'll figure out what I mean.

This is a comedy starring Adam Sandler, who plays a businessman wrongly sentenced to an anger-management program, where he meets aggressive instructor Buddy Rydell, played by Jack Nicholson. I saw this movie once, on a plane. It was an OK movie to pass the time during the jet ride. There are campy scenes at the expense of Sandler and the overly crazy Nicholson, mixing in to provide us with a mildly entertaining film. Marisa Tomei provided a nice balance of romance and drama, serving as Sandler's love interest. The plot was OK and the overall story was serviceable; I did find the script handling dealing with one's own anger clever, resulting in the characters serving up some good laughs and puns. The plot also didn't drag on that would have made this movie boring.Aside from some of the camp and downright silly sequences, like the monk scene, this movie is worth at least one watch. Grade C+