Anger Management
As Bad As It Gets
The cheap and easy way to do a review of Anger Management would be to get angry. You know me. You know how I get. You know that this is just the kind of movie that is guaranteed to push all my critical buttons. You know that this is just the sort of movie that someone like me will just rip to shreds, given the chance. You know that I know how to use my powers of invective and sarcasm and wit to destroy movies just like this one. You know me. When I see movies like this, I become… Ninja Movie Critic! Armed to the teeth, ready to fling insults around like throwing stars, prepared to spring upon the stupid (talentless director Peter Segal) the inept (screenwriter hack David Dorfman) and the unwary (you good people out in the audience). Anger Management is just the kind of movie that should get me all riled up, evoke my negative energy, you know, make me angry. And you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.
But that’s the cheap way out.
Anger Management is important not because of what it is — a cheesy, pointless piece of offal, directed at an audience that doesn’t ask for much better. It is important for what it represents; a certain style of filmmaking, a certain way of doing things. No, that’s incorrect, or at least it isn’t enough. Anger Management represents a certain attitude, a certain contempt on the part of Hollywood for its audience, a certain belief that, if properly marketed, a movie will attract a substantial audience and make a certain amount of money despite the fact that it isn’t good for anything except being cut up for ukulele picks.
The marketing of a movie is a black art, and is practiced by masters of manipulation and chicanery. (Much like Jack Nicholson’s character here, come to think of it.) There are the master editors who chop the movie up into shreds and reconstitute it as a trailer. There are the less-talented people who take the one or two funny jokes in the movie (here, Sandler and Nicholson sharing a bed) and turn that into a commercial. There are the usual brigade of gullible or easily-impressed movie writers who can be relied upon to turn out favorable-sounding quotes.
But the real marketing effort for Anger Management shouldn’t have to be reliant on any of that nonsense. Its casting of Jack Nicholson opposite Adam Sandler ought to have obviated the need for any such trickery and tomfoolery. There was every possibility that teaming up Sandler, America’s most successful comic actor, with a living legend like Nicholson, would prove to be a fruitful comic collaboration. Simply, Anger Management really should have sold itself. It wouldn’t even need much of a marketing campaign, unless… unless it was really misbegotten and pointless and bad, or something, in which case, not any amount of marketing could save it.
Anger Management is a shell of a movie, a whited sepulcher, a shiny exterior with a corroded and rank interior. Its imagination begins and ends with the casting of its two lead characters. All it does is put Nicholson and Sandler in a room together and expects magic to happen, without ever once having to work for it or think about what the story should be about or where it should end up. I put more thought into my weekly grocery list than what went into this movie.
The lack of thought is most apparent in the characters played by the two leads; they’re not doing anything other than playing amalgams of every other character they’ve ever played. Sandler’s stock character is a modern-day Popeye the Sailor Man, picked on by family and society and love until he learns how to channel that built-up rage and aggression into something positive. Here, he’s a flunky for a pet-supply company who has to assert himself to get a promotion. Nicholson is doing his charismatic psycho bit, primarily from As Good As It Gets, but we see him ordering wheat toast (from Five Easy Pieces) and wearing a USMC T-shirt (shades of Colonel Nathan Jessup from A Few Good Men), etc. etc. But there’s nothing interesting or exciting or new about these characters here; they’re recycled, reconstituted, thin shadows of themselves.
To make matters worse, there are simply very few scenes where Nicholson and Sandler are left alone to work out their comic potential. The movie keeps throwing in all sorts of odd and wacky characters — comic relief, mind you, in what is supposed to be a comedy — and then not doing anything with them. Most of them are in Nicholson’s group therapy; Luis Guzman as a swishy Puerto Rican, John Turturro as a rageaholic New Yorker, some random guy as a rabid Philadelphia sports fan, two lesbian porn stars. For the entire first half of the movie, these are the characters that carry the bulk of the comic workload, and NOT Sandler and Nicholson.
This is a recipe for disaster. It’s like, you know, going to a Lakers game and seeing Robert Horry as the focus for the offense. For most of the movie, the two biggest stars simply are either not on the court, or they’re passing.
The movie reaches its comic potential only when it realizes that Nicholson can manipulate Sandler into doing basically anything that he wants, because otherwise Sandler will go to jail. This results in a string of back-and-forth practical jokes — the best of which ends with the best scene in the movie, in which a nearly-naked Heather Graham whips cupcakes at a fleeing Sandler.
But the whole point of practical jokes is that they are cruel, and this is a movie that is cruel, unnecessarily cruel, to Sandler, certainly, and the audience. The joke here is on us. The joke is that you and I were tricked, enticed, seduced into seeing this movie, and then had our expectations for even a moderately funny movie cruelly dashed. It’s wicked to treat a perfectly nice movie audience this way — even more so because that audience, bless its heart, doesn’t really ask for much out of movies anymore, and a good portion of it won’t even realized how savagely they have been treated.
That’s what’s really disturbing about Anger Management, is its contempt for its audience, its willingness to make a movie that’s only about a tenth of as funny as it could have been, should have been, and its understanding that it doesn’t need to do much more than that to rake in the trusting, the gullible, and the easily amused. Anger Management is a wretched little movie that does the bare minimum to skate by, confident that it will make just enough money to keep the studio afloat to crank out more lowest-common-denominator rubbish, over and over again, until the nation’s movie audiences realize what is being done to them and why. This kind of thing makes me sick. It’s appalling to realize just how low Hollywood will go. I can’t BELIEVE THAT ROTTEN MOVIES LIKE THIS ARE MADE EVERY SINGLE DAY AND NOBODY HAS THE GUTS TO SAY ANYTHING TO STOP THIS INSANITY!!!!
Hey, looks like I got angry after all. So should you.