12 • THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
FILM
THURSDAY,APRIL17,2003
'Anger Management'a let down
REVIEW
The West Side Story favorite "I Feel Pretty" gets an Adam Sandler/Jack Nicholson makeover in Anger Management, an otherwise tame "Happy-Madison" production that has our generation's most beloved comedian getting a makeover of his own.
Stephen Shupe
sshupe@kansan.com
As Dave Buznik, a repressed executive at a pet products company, Sandler reins in his usual shout for half tones and shy, mumbling intonations. The violence has been erased from his voice, as if the hyper-immediacy of his "Love Stinks" rendition in The Wedding Singer never existed.
I don't know who wants to see a toned-down, half-assed Sandler. Either you dig his in-your-face style of physical threats as jokes or you don't. If his normal level is a bark, he barely manages a growl in Anger Management.
After an airplane incident lands him in court, Dave is ordered to attend group sessions with therapist Buddy Rydell, played by Nicholson. Soon, the vitriolic Buddy has moved into Dave's apartment, an invasion of privacy that threatens to push Dave over the edge.
Nicholson, in a performance inspired by Nick Nolte's crazed DUI mug shot from last September, seems amused that Sandler would try to act opposite him. His amusement is contagious. Sandler, though returns to his career-long impersonation of the nerdy kid in speech class who writes a joke and thinks his monosyllabic reading of it will make people laugh.
There's more to like about Anger Management beyond Nicholson forcing Sandler to sing the Streisand-esque ditty "I Feel Pretty" in the midst of rush-hour traffic.
John Turturro, the scene-stealing butler from Mr. Deeds, upstages Sandler for the second time in a row as Dave's "anger ally."
(His timely letter to Geraldo Rivera reads, "You're gonna die, bitch.") And if we can't have Rob Schneider say it as he did in The Waterboy, a perfect substitute to deliver the "Happy-Madison" staple, "You can do it!" is Rudy Giuliani in one of the film's many celebrity cameos.
Lame uplift fights for screen space with Sandler's patented vulgarity, so much that I got the feeling that director Peter Segal (Tommy Boy) had the project taken from his control.
The film's opening is in the sketch-comedy spirit of Billy Madison, with a mentally handicapped girl slobbering and wailing for effect. But immediately after that, the action begins to streamline Sandler's familiar tricks. It's as if the opening was shot in a last-minute ditch to keep his fans from being alienated from the get-go.
Anger Management's Manhattan backdrops are handsomely filmed — a considerable improvement on the student-film look of Sandler's worst movie, Little Nicky. But there's little to be said about a comedy that reaches its comedic nova with a fat kitty in designer clothes.
ANGER MANAGEMENT ... C
Starring: Adam Sandler, Jack Nicholson and Marisa Tomei
Rated PG-13 for crude sexual content and language
Playing at South Wind 12 Theaters, 3433 Iowa St.
Everyone is slumming here. Consider their recent films, which represent some of the best of the decade: Sandler and Luis Guzman in Punch-Drunk Love, Nicholson and Harry Dean Stanton in The Pledge, Turturro in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Kurt Fuller in Auto Focus, Heather Graham in From Hell, John C. Reilly in Gangs of New York and Marisa Tomei in In the Bedroom.
It must have been time to pay the bills when these actors signed up for Anger Management,a promising casting coup that can't decide whether it's playing to the children of Eminem or Frank Sinatra.
Shupe is an Augusta graduate student in journalism.