Anger Management

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * *)

Given the amount of talent on show here, it's amazing how completely this film manages to miss its target. Watching it is like trying to hear a joke told across a busy street: you're pretty sure something funny is happening, but you just can't make it out.

With his risky performance in Punch Drunk Love, Sandler proved there was more to him than the flatulent adolescent, and he confirms it here, playing Dave Biznik, a put-upon junior manager who gets into a misunderstanding on an aeroplane and finds himself in court, and sentenced to a course of anger management.

The joke is that Dave is dangerously short of anger, or any other sort of passion for that matter. He's a terminally repressed dweeb who can't stand to kiss his girl (Tomei) in public, ask his boss for promotion or even hire a decent lawyer to get him out of the surreal nightmare he's trapped in.

You can dimly make out the potential for a truly subversive comedy here, about what happens when a man who's not angry gets told he is - and gets angry. We keep waiting for Dave to really lose his rag and he never delivers. Instead, and until its "surprise"ending (which is lazy and grotesquely ingratiating), the film uses its skilfully assembled setup as the basis of some cringingly obvious comedy.

He's assigned to treatment by famed therapist Buddy Rydell (Nicholson), which is the cue for a lot of aimless mugging and wild eyebrow raising. There are moments that are more than mildly amusing: John Turturro is great as Dave's volcanic "anger buddy" (though the film quickly drops that promising subplot), and celebrity cameos by a host of walk-ons, from Heather Graham to John McEnroe, are not without wit.

But the fact that Rydell's therapy has no internal logic (some of it is borderline criminal) will alert the sharp-witted to the final twist well ahead of time, even if it prepares no one for the sheer scale of its clumsiness. The idea may have been born in high-concept heaven but it never gets out of comedic limbo.

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Adam Sandler, Marisa Tomei, John Turturro Director: Peter Segal Running time: 100 mins Rating: M (offensive language, sexual references) Screening: Village Hoyts, Berkeley cinemas