Anger Management: Critic Reviews

A comedy as bracing and furiously right for the moment as it is broad and huggable.

Some of the movie is so primitively staged that you can almost hear someone leafing through the book of instructions that came with the camera.

Can it really be true that the latest Adam Sandler film is, well, quite funny? Ish? Yes -- but only because he's paired with Jack Nicholson.

Flimsy follow-through or not, the teaming still works, and so, at times, does the premise.

Sandler's blank, doughy countenance seems duller than ever.

Miller time for the funny bone.

A stoopid movie, front-loaded with infantile shtick.

The free-associational lurch of the enigmatic Nicholson 12-step program is set to a familiar backbeat of juvenile gross-out and homosexual panic; what's truly illogical is the blithe conflation of anger management and assertiveness training.

Has hell frozen over? Not only is Jack Nicholson starring in a buddy movie alongside Adam Sandler, but of the two, Sandler's low-key approach is preferable.

Folks who loved Punch-Drunk Love won't care much for Anger Management, but cameo appearances by a host of famous names occur frequently enough that we're forced to stay alert, if only to catch them.

A happy experience.

This is the kind of coarse comedy where a fart serves as a punch line.

The concept is inspired. The execution is lame. Anger Management, a film that might have been one of Adam Sandler's best, becomes one of Jack Nicholson's worst.

Punch-Drunk Love for the masses.

Unpredictably funny.

Anger Management plays the same tune too much of the time to live up to its potential. Still, it's good for a giggle.

While it includes some funny scenes, one senses that the Nicholson-Sandler pairing could have achieved much more.

Embarrassed and clueless, Mr. Nicholson is clearly slumming. As a goopy, doofus pet-clothes designer whose only talent is nostril-wiggling, Mr. Sandler comes closer to playing his real self.

A couple of brakes-off set pieces to the side, the antics here are strained, graceless and tiresomely crude, the sorts of things audiences feel they're supposed to laugh at rather than well-developed situations that generate genuine amusement.

Anger Management is a ragged piece of filmmaking, but the odds are you'll have as good a time watching it as Nicholson and Sandler seemed to have making it.

Throw enough money at a Sandler movie and it will look like a decent film -- except when you let middling hack Peter Segal of Nutty Professor II direct.

The promise of Anger Management lasts for all of about 15 minutes.

It's always a relief to come out of an Adam Sandler movie without a case of hives, and you can comfortably attend Anger Management without prophylactic antihistamines.

The only thing you'll be mad about is spending 10 bucks to watch Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler try too hard.

Strenuous, spottily amusing.