Anger Management - The Filthy Critic

This week:
Anger Management

Filthy says:
"Sandler blows."

You know what I like best in a comedy? Humor. That shit cracks me up. I'm telling you, jokes are the keg of beer at the company picnic when it comes to funny. Without it, you might as well drag me down to the potato-sack race and shoot me in the nuts right in front of the six-year olds. Sometimes, though, a movie is made that claims to be a comedy and it doesn't have jokes in it. I can understand, really. Those grassfuckers in Hollywood are too busy with their Atkins diets and selling their Tae Bo tapes on eBay to bother with little details like that. Anger Management is one of those anemic comedies. It's not so much that I didn't find it funny. I didn't. But, who the fuck would when the filmmakers forgot to add the jokes? AS it is, it's tedious, loud, contrived and lousy.

There're some jokes in there, sure, but not nearly enough. And the ones they included are such retreaded, inconsistent crap that they're about as funny as a goiter. I'm not sure if I have ever mentioned it before, but this guy Adam Sandler makes some god-awful shitty movies. He doesn't have to, but he finds it so easy to turn out lazy, unpolished turds full of immature jokes and punchless gags. He hires all his unemployable comedy friends and we're supposed to chuckle along with their camaraderie, as though paying eight bucks makes us eligible to be in on the in-jokes. At some point, I expected this bastard to grow up and actually try to make a decent movie. I give up.

Anger Management is different from Sandler's other shit, at least, in that instead of playing a socially retarded man-child, he's trying to play an adult. Problem is, he has no idea what interesting adults are like. He thinks they are kids, laugh at the same immature shit, but are more boring.

Sandler plays a dullard with an unrealistically nice apartment and bottles of pent-up rage who, once again, is shit upon at work and takes it. He dates a boring woman but is constantly insecure that she will be stolen away by a guy with a bigger dick. Seriously, this is what passes for an adult concern in Sandler's world. One day, while flying to a meeting, he meets Jack Nicholson, an unorthodox anger management counselor. After an airline incident, Sandler is assigned to anger management class, and guess who his teacher is.

Through script contortions that would make those freaks in Cirque du Soleil folks proud, Nicholson moves into Sandler's apartment and gives him intensive therapy. And boy, oh boy, that's where the fun starts. Or rather, I got the impression that it was supposed to.

The movie script is a limp-dick. Most of what's supposed to be comedy are vague ideas that come across like Calvin Klein models: nice in theory, but no meat on the bones. Some were probably funny as one-sentence descriptions before the script was written, but when dragged out for five minutes they fall flat on their skinny asses. A confrontation with a peaceful monk, a bar encounter with Heather Graham that plays out without punchline, the destruction of a Lexus, and a boring-as-a grandmother-sorting-medications marriage proposal at Yankee Stadium are just unbearable slogs to sit through. Why didn't someone bother to take the time to flesh these scenes out? Did the scriptwriters think, "Oh, we can just make it funny later?"

Watching Jack Nicholson in Anger Management is like getting root canal by a singing dentist. Who knew that deep down this distinguished actor had such community-theater tendencies? If the joke ain't funny, he figures, be loud and broad and occasionally fart for good measure. He chews the scenery like a hillbilly with a plug of chaw, and the result is overlabored, desperate cornpone. His performance is the movie's most consistent, but it's also the most desperate. And really, if I wanted to laugh at desperation, I wouldn't have gotten sick of watching the Harelip try to find her car keys every night in 1997.

Sandler just sucks and he isn't getting any better. How many times is he going to waste golden opportunities to make great comedy by barfing up the easiest, laziest gags imaginable? Anger Management is a more adult "comedy" but that just means more boring, and punctuated with the same old awful fart gags and tedious cameos by the likes of Kevin Nealon and a bunch of boney ancients at Yankee Stadium who cling to their jobs under the name of "tradition."

Which brings me to another point. Fuck the Yankees, those overpaid, uncompetitive crybabies with the obnoxious, deep-pocketed owner who tries to singlehandedly undermine baseball in the name of his own ego. In Anger Management Sandler and his ladyfriend are supposed to be Yankee fans in this movie. It's fitting, because it takes no guts or imagination to root for them. Fuck the fucking Yankees. I can't stand those assholes with their shitty stadium and announcer who can't pronounce jack shit, and that's when he actually remembers to. I'm sick of Robert Merrill over-enunciating the national anthem. And I'm sick of their lazy asshole fans who think they have a birthright to waste twice as much money as any other team in pursuit of championships. What's the fun in rooting for a team that is supposed to win, pays more than anyone else to win, and is comprised of overpaid whiners and cheats like David Wells and Roger Clemens?

Well, leave it to Sandler to root for the Yankees. There is nothing easier than cheering for the overdog. And leave it to him to base his movie on the assumption that we all just love unfunny cameos by Roger Clemens and Derek Jeter. Maybe this shit plays to the meatheads who love the pinstriped assholes who crap on Babe Ruth's legacy every time they step on the field, but it's painful to me. If you're going to spend 20 minutes of your movie in that armpit in the Bronx, for God's sake, at least try to make it funny to the 95% of us who don't blindly worship that festering boil called the Yankees.

The Yankee shit is just another example of the lazy, self-interested filmmaking of Adam Sandler. Fuck the Yankees and fuck him for taking my eight bucks for another laughless exercise. One Finger.

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