Dave Buznik is a mild mannered kind of guy that lets the whole world walk all over him. He has been doing his bosses job for five years with no respect or credit for any of the work he has been doing. When his boss finally gives him a chance to showcase himself by sending him to St. Louis on a business trip this is Dave’s chance to finally shine and hopefully get a new executive promotion that just opened. But when there is a misunderstanding on the plane where the flight attendants and a US marshal think Dave has gone ballistic and he ends up being jailed for the incident. When he goes to court he is told that he will have to attend anger management as part of his sentence. The course is being taught by Dr. Buddy Rydell an eccentric and quite unconventional doctor who had just happened to be sitting next to Dave during the flight. But instead of just signing Dave out of the course like he wanted to the good doctor actually moves in with him and begins to take over his life. The doctor also introduces him to a group of quite crazy and angry of patients of his, and even assigns one of these crazies as his so-called anger ally. Dave who had had a very ordinary life before this as he was engaged to a beautiful woman Linda and a respectable job now finds all this in danger as the good doctor seems hell bent on destroying everything in a pretense of healing him from and anger he never felt he had. So now Dave must wither stand up for himself and try and escape from the clearly insane doctor or find his life torn to shreds but nothing is as easy as that as anything that can go wrong does and will.

I really wanted to like this movie, as the story seemed one of the most unique I had heard of in years and I had been excited about its release. It seemed impossible that they could go wrong teaming up such great stars as Nicholson and Sandler in what had to be one of the funniest pretense of all times but somehow and I can’t tell you how because I am not sure how they screwed this movie up. Sure the movie is funny at times and I laughed quite hard at some of the funnier scenes but a lot of the movie was a trek through drudgery and plain silliness. Maybe I have grown cynical because I remember laughing so hard at Happy Gillmore the first time I saw it that I was crying. This movie does not even come to half that level and just seemed to be missing something. Sandler I believe is to be faulted as he just didn’t seem to have the panache he once hard on the screen and trudge through a lot of his line and scenes. Nicholson seemed to also think that is crazy facial expressions could pull some of the scenes though their awkwardness rather than decent scripting and acting. Don’t get me wrong I found the movie funny and ingenious at times but if failed to live up to his very high potential that could have made it one of the funniest movies of all time rather that a half asked job of a movie it was.
3 stars out of 5