'Starring Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler' is something I never thought I would see on a movie poster.  The combination of one of the greatest actors of his generation and the man responsible for Happy Gilmore and Mr. Deeds, seemed dubious at best.  I'm guessing that the producers of this movie are banking on the odd combination of these two to draw in the curiosity seekers.  However, despite the gimmick, it turns out that Anger Management is check your highbrow at the door, laugh-out-loud funny!

Dave Buznick (Sandler) is an executive assistant living in New York city.  As shown in nearly every preview for the movie, on a plane flight he is accused of becoming angry with a flight attendant to such a degree that the judge sentences him to Anger Management Therapy, where of course the therapist turns out to be Dr. Buddy Rydell (Nicholson), whose motto is kNOw Buddy Cares!  So much for set-up.  Despite its overplay in the previews, this is one of the funniest scenes in the movie.  I particularly enjoyed the airline staff's over-use of the phrase, "Sir, our country is going through a difficult time right now" as an excuse for everything.

Adam Sandler is a one-character actor, with the possible exception of his performance in Punch Drunk Love.  He is invariably the sweet, but immature guy who generally ends up punching somebody (which come to think of it, does include his character from Punch Drunk Love); just the sort of person who would be perfect for Anger Management Therapy.  At the beginning of this movie Dave is the exact opposite of a typical Sandler character, he is overly mild and diffident, and convinced that he doesn't belong with the other assorted angry characters that make up Buddy's circle of anger.  Buddy though, is able to show him that his problem isn't that he gets angry too quickly as is the case with the rest of the group, but that he never shows his anger at all.

When in a drunken and misguided moment, Dave ends up breaking a cocktail waitress's nose while trying to steal a blind-man's cane, he is further sentenced to thirty days of intensive anger management with Dr. Buddy.  This time the therapy includes Buddy moving in with him and following him around 24-hours a day.

While Sandler has some funny moments as the hapless Dave, it is Nicholson who steals the movie.  He may have already played the devil once, in The Witches of Eastwick, but now that he's a few years older, he looks even more impish and demonic as the puppet-master pulling Sandler's strings.  And his duet with Sandler on "I Feel Pretty" will stay with me for a long time.  If Jack needed an outlet for his wild side after playing the subdued Schmidt in About Schmidt, he couldn't have found a bigger one than this role.

Oh sure most of the humor here is crude, rude, and juvenile enough to make a 5-year old laugh, but so what?  Not every movie has to be high art, does it?  Surely we can all let our hair down long enough to enjoy seeing a Buddhist monk being given a wedgie can't we?

And while the movie is a bit obvious as we watch Dave traverse his Anger Therapy and try to win back the love of his fiancée (played by the always delightful Marisa Tomei), and the last ten minutes are way too corny, and by then Dave has become just your typical Sandler character, but does it really matter so long as we keep laughing?

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''I feel pretty. Oh so pretty....'' If ever, there was ever a song that I didn't want stuck in my head it is that one. It is now firmly lodged there. Thanks to a potentially classic scene, it will be a while before I can get that melody out of my head. While driving over a New York bridge, Buddy pulls the emergency brake and stops the car. He then makes David sing every chorus. It is intended to relax Dave, and the final punch line is that it does. You just can't sing that song and be in a bad mood.

The movie is full of good scenes. Heather Graham wearing only Boston Red Sox underwear and throwing brownies at Sandler is an image that will stick with me. Another one is the porn lesbians discussing why they are in therapy. The problem then, is that this movie is like a bunch of Saturday Night Live skits and not a movie.

Still, as Scott wrote, this movie is funny. Buddy throws out Dave's Carpenter CDs because they are ''angry music.'' Dave is insecure about his penis size so he asks the porno lesbians about size. One responds; ''Well this is a subject where we but heads. She likes them big and I like them enormous.'' It doesn't help that Dave's girlfriend has a hung male friend whom Buddy describes as being ''able to satisfy a Blue Whale.''

Ok, Scott did mention it was juvenile humor. He wasn't kidding. No matter what intellect level, if a movie can make me laugh it is good in my book.

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