Anger Management, a comedy that’s as broad as the open range and not nearly as dry, casts Adam Sandler as Dave Buznik, a meek New Yorker who drones each day as an assistant in a company that designs plus-size clothing for cats. A misunderstanding on an airplane lands Dave in court for assault and battery and the judge (the late Lynne Thigpen, in her final film appearance) places him under the care of Dr. Buddy Rydell (Jack Nicholson), an anger management counselor.
Buddy, however, proves to be the one with the loose screw. He tests Dave’s patience by moving into his apartment, following him to work and eventually making a play for his girlfriend, the extremely understanding Linda (Marisa Tomei). Dave’s tendency, we learn, has always been to internalize his rage, but Buddy’s increasingly destructive presence soon causes him to genuinely act out.
The audience for this film must rely on previous knowledge of Sandler’s tightly wound characters: Happy Gilmore, Barry Egan and the Wedding Singer all inform the sketchily defined presence of ‘Dave.’ Oddly, David Dorfman’s script casts him as the passive straight man, while Nicholson, in what feels like an awkward deflation after his startling work in About Schmidt, mugs for the camera with no hint of discipline. There’s something unsettling about the way Nicholson, despite giving his broadest performance in recent memory, nevertheless gets swallowed whole by the film’s shrillness.
The film’s tension is meant to escalate through comically embarrassing situations, much like Meet the Parents, but director Peter Segal (Naked Gun 33 1/3, The Nutty Professor 2) sorely lacks Jay Roach’s feel for effective, slow-burn pacing. The movie lurches from one garish comic set piece to another and the jokes fall flat twice as often as they work. Familiar Sandler-movie hang-ups the constant jokes about big-breasted women, the weirdly ambivalent fascination with gay men (including Luis Guzman as a mincing, mesh-wearing group therapy patient) provide some of the movie’s comic low points.
Some laughs abound, including a brilliant sight gag involving Kevin Nealon (as Dave’s ineffectual, and gay, lawyer), a tennis ball and a blind guy (Harry Dean Stanton). The opening airplane scene works, too, because it plays on recognizable aspects of human nature, rather than just offering up context-free clowning.
What resonates more is the bizarre parade of moderate-to-big stars in shrill, often-degrading cameo appearances. Besides Stanton as the blind barroom brawler, there’s Heather Graham as a nympho with body image issues, John C. Reilly as a thong-wearing monk and, most memorably, Woody Harrelson as a German transvestite ho.
With all the ham on display, the presence of Tomei, that dynamic yet thoroughly relaxed actress who is as good as anyone at giving life to colorless girlfriend roles, comes as a huge relief. The other actors are too busy trying to shoehorn their talents into broadly conceived yet sketchily drawn caricatures. In the end, they’re populating a movie with little more to offer than an endless parade of dick jokes.