Just watched Anger Management today, my first movie in a theater in almost two months. I’ve never been a fan of Adam Sandler movies, mostly because I thought he did his best work almost ten years ago, in Saturday Night Live, and has still yet to surpass that. This movie has done nothing to break that tradition, unfortunately.
Pet clothes designer Sandler has problems expressing his anger, and psychologist Jack Nicholson helps him deal with it. It sounds like a good premise, but there just isn’t enough story material to really keep it interesting.
Sometimes I get the feeling that Adam Sandler conceptualizes his movies as a series of short comedy skits then tries to come up with a story to contain all of them. There are sequences in the movie (“Group Therapy”, “Sandler vs. Monk”, “Woody Harrelson in a Dress”) that would have been exceedingly funny if they had been standalone skits. All together though, they become just another loose jumble of one-liners and slapstick gags that never really draws you in.
(There was one line that stood out for me though. At the end, Sandler is proposing to Marisa Tomei and he says, “I want to have kids with you … They can have your eyes, and your lips, and my … last name …” I thought it was funny in a witty sort of way, something you don’t see too often in movies like this.)
It’s too bad, because Jack Nicholson was supposed to be the one good thing to ever happen to a Happy Madison-produced movie. He’s one of the few actors I know that can say the corniest lines of dialogue and still manage to sound convincing. Although he’s leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else in this cast, it still doesn’t save his performance from being one of the more forgettable ones in his long career.
Meanwhile, Sandler himself has still not managed to transcend his Waterboy persona (or maybe, simply doesn’t care to). If Brendan Fraser always portrays a confused simpleton, Sandler is eternally cast as a retarded loser.
Ah well. Nothing special here I’m afraid.
I’m not giving up on Adam Sandler as an actor though. I’ve still yet to watch Punch Drunk Love and you never know what kind of performance director P.T. Anderson could wrestle out of him.