Roxio CinemaNow - Anger Management

There is unanimous agreement among critics that Anger Management, starring Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson, will be the big winner at the box office this weekend. What they don't agree on is whether the film is worth the price of admission. Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times describes it as drab and punchless and, in particular, blames the director, Peter Segal. Some of the movie is so primitively staged, he writes, that you can almost hear someone leafing through the book of instructions that came with the camera. Jami Bernard in the New York Post reaches much the same conclusion. Her review is headed Much of this anger is misdirected. Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe joins in the Segal-bashing: Awful directors often flourish in Sandler movies. Here, Peter Segal, who also made Nutty Professor II: The Klumps and the brutally unfunny Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, shows us what he might have done with a potty-mouthed school play. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times laments: 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. Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal sums up the film this way: It's an Adam Sandler comedy. ... That is to say, it's slapdash, crudely crafted and resolutely adolescent. And occasionally, though only occasionally, very funny. On the other hand, Mark Caro in the Chicago Tribune remarks that the film avoids much of the crassness of most Sandler movies. The aim is mostly to amuse without offending. But, hey, being amused without being offended by a mainstream Sandler comedy feels like true progress. And Lou Lumenick in the New York Post concludes that the film may be 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.