Scream, yell, cuss, curse, kick, hit, punch, smash, throw plates against the wall, toss television sets out second-story windows, pick fights with burly strangers, play out violent scenarios inside my head. A bad movie is a loss of two hours, plus or minus. Time is one of the things I value most in the world. When my time is wasted I get angry. You’d think something titled Anger Management would be therapeutic, especially with the duet of Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson headlining the theatre marquee. And with the tax-season blahs upon me, a little laughter therapy was a nice idea. Instead this film about an insecure advertising executive’s assistant forced to experience 24-hour treatment for suppressed rage with an unorthodox doctor (Nicholson), made me angry. It didn’t help alleviate stress and offered only limited laughter. Instead I thought I’d use words to list the things that made me last night, thus creating my own therapy.
1. Chaotic line-ups. When I arrived at the line-up things were branched to the left of the ticket window. But then a couple decided to branch it off to the right. So now there’s two lines for one ticket seller. Like slow traffic, both lines merge but not fast enough to keep both lines from growing.
2. The high price of admission. When you’re the only screen in town you can essentially dictate prices. That’s exactly what this theater did. Today $9.50 doesn’t seem too outrageous, but only when there’s stadium seating, comfortable seats with lots of leg room and a killer screen and sound system. Instead I shelled out for a smallish screen with bad focus and sticky floors. Even the pre-show slideshow looked amateurish. A little hint for the minimum-wage projectionist: adjusting the lens on the slide projector will make them straight and keep the graphics from bleeding off the screen.
3. The fact that Miramax is still sitting on Shaolin Soccer. Dear Mr. Weinstein. You’ve got a hit film in your vault. I see that you’re finally showing trailers for it. Does that mean this classic Asian comedy will soon finally be hitting North American theatres or are you going to continue to procrastinate like you did with Gangs of New York?
4. Sandler and Nicholson crossing paths 20 minutes too early. The opening credits are barely over and Anger Management’s payoff has already been blown: the initial meeting of the two stars. The film could have been called anything and it’d still be referred to as the Sandler/Nicholson movie. Such an early encounter reeks of coincidence.
5. The snooty couple who comes late for the movie opening weekend expecting to get a good seat. So the movie itself is 10 minutes in, this following another 10 minutes of commercials and previews. It’s opening weekend and Anger Management is on pace for $45 million in its first three days. In short, the theater is packed except for a few scattered seats in the front and two at the end of my row. In wanders a couple looking like they were fresh from the cappuccino bar making a fair bit of noise. They stop at my row and look to the end, but the usher points to the front. The cappuccino couple sits for two minutes before returning to my row.
“Um, I think we’re going to sit here instead,” the lady says. The theatre laughs, I miss out on a couple of jokes while this lady and her partner disturb our entire row as they make it to their seats. No “Excuse me,” or “Sorry for the disturbance.” Moral of the story: show up on time for opening weekend, maybe even a few minutes early.
6. Jokes stemming from social stereotypes rather than individual quirks. Sadly, stereotypes are nothing new in Sandler movies. On the surface a girl in a straightjacket giggling like an insane-o clown might be funny, but when you think about the gag does is make fun of her. The girl at the start of Anger Management has little necessity or even value. Throughout the film there’s more of the same including Luis Guzman playing a gay control freak complete with lisp and flamboyant hand flailing. Instead why not look for more individual quirks within the character. Supporting roles from John Turturro, John C. Reiley, Woody Harrelson and Heather Graham come a lot closer offering some of the movie’s best moments. But the stereotypes often prevail providing easy punchlines and the potential to reinforce damaging notions among the audience.
7. Rudy Giuliani’s attempt at acting. A reading of Anger Management could be argued that it’s therapy for New Yorkers dealing with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. So why not have former mayor Rudy Giuliani show up for a couple of lines? As the mighty eighties band Styx once said, “Everybody gotto Mr. Roboto.”
8. Endings that tie up all loose ends and explain everything in the final two minutes. As concluded earlier, seeing a movie requires about two hours of your time. You’d think that in those 120 minutes one could lay out a plot and carry it through to a logical conclusion. In the case of Anger Management we’re thrown into it, and while some things don’t make a lot of sense, we roll with it because it’s funny. But then in the last couple of scenes everything becomes crystal clear like Grandma’s polished Christmas silverware. Talk about feeling cheated.
I chuckled quite a bit, but when you have Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson teaming up anything less than laugh-out-loud hilarity has to be considered a major disappointment.
Anger Management Gallery
