Mismatch of the day

After Punch- Drunk Love and About Schmidt, both the stars in Anger Management possibly felt in rapid need of something restorative. Namely, a big box-office hit. They combine forces to make sure of it in this movie.

But will their respective fans enjoy seeing two contrasting talents, one a graceful pole-vaulter in the art of high comedy, the other a piss-on-the-wall artist in gross-out farces, being yoked together in a crude, loud, vulgar sitcom with only a single comic concept to keep playing variations on? If so, it will be due to public curiosity about such a mismatch more than any evidence of inspired complicity.

Adam Sandler plays Dave Buznik, the sort of undemonstrative nerd, slimy and creepy at the same time, who loses his temper on a plane, is arrested by an "air marshal" and ends up in court sentenced to 20 hours in a therapy group run by Dr Buddy Rydell, a charlatan whose business card proclaims "No Buddy Cares". Played by Jack Nicholson at full blast with beard, beret, bristling eyebrows and a smile that looks scoured daily by steel wool, Dr Buddy believes in stoking anger with insult, innuendo and intrusive prurience.

It's a part in which Nicholson gets - and gives - good value. But he has to stoop low to pick up the laughs. Patients under Dr Buddy's tongue-lashing treatment include, besides Dave, two lesbian porn stars (January Jones, Krista Allen), a swarthy Latino queen (Luis Guzman), a rabid sports nut (Jonathan Loughran) and an aggressive ex-con who got his aunt pregnant (John Turturro).

At first it is amusing to watch Dr Buddy goading Dave, pushing his buttons and setting off a controlled explosion which he can quash with a supercilious purr of, "Sarcasm is anger's ugly cousin." But once the fine-tuned verbals between the two are exhausted, the physical stuff is pretty low-rent and involves the therapist moving into Dave's bachelor loft as tormentorin-residence.

Nicholson then trades in his own well-honed manner of smirking devilment for Sandler's stock line in gross gags about body parts. Dr Buddy not only sleeps in the nude, but sleeps with Dave under the same duvet, which he ever so delicately lifts up to fan his fart out.

The film incorporates an amazingly high count of penis jokes - a Sandler trademark - including a running (or dangling) gag about the size of Dave's well-endowed rival (Allen Covert) for his girlfriend (Marisa Tomei, wasted). Both men size each other up at the urinal of a posh bar, while TV screens at eye-level are showing pictures of fishermen measuring the day's catch of sea bass.

Only a few years ago this kind of crassness would have been blue-pencilled out of the quality films attracting "A" list stars, and left to the body-fluid exhibitionists of teenage campus land. Audiences are still looking at the stars, but nowadays they often do it from the gutter of films like Anger Management.

The script chucks in almost any sequence it thinks lubricious enough to generate hee-haws, including a strip-tease from a blonde babe (Heather Graham) anxious about exposing her cellulite, whom Dr Buddy arranges for Dave to pick up with the irresistible assurance that his pants are ready to explode.

One sequence in the film is unexpectedly funny. Not funny enough to redeem the rest, but a rare occasion when Sandler and Nicholson seem to be singing from the same hymn sheet - or, rather, the song sheet of the Stephen Sondheim lyric "I Feel Pretty", from West Side Story. The point of their duet is to extinguish Dave's temper tantrum. But to perform it, they halt their car in the rushhour traffic on Queensboro Bridge and incur the fury of stalled drivers as they put over the ditty.