Anger Management (Revolution Studios, Happy Madison Productions, Anger Management LLC, Jack Giarraputo Productions, Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures Releasing, 2003)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (September 3, 2026) my husband Charles and I ran a DVD we’d found in someone’s giveaway box of a movie called Anger Management (2003), directed by Peter Segal from a script by David Dorfman and featuring Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson. Sandler plays Dave Buznik, a very junior executive who’s essentially the office whipping boy for his immediate supervisor, Frank Head (Kurt Fuller). Frank has risen through the company (which makes clothes for pets, which is as ghastly as it sounds; if nature had meant dogs and cats to wear clothes, she wouldn’t have given them built-in fur coats) largely on Dave’s ideas. The film opens with a prologue set 25 years before the main action in which Dave is played as a boy by Jonathan Osser and he’s dared to kiss a girl his own age, Sara (Melissa Mitchell), only as he’s doing that a bully named Arnie Shankman (Alan James Morgan) sneaks up behind him, pulls his pants down and exposes Dave’s boy cock for all to see. Then the film flashes forward 25 years and the adult Dave is flying to Chicago from New York on business, only someone has already taken his reserved seat and arrogantly refuses to move. Dave finds that the only available empty seat on the plane is next to Buddy Rydell (Jack Nicholson), an arrogant prick who’s got headphones plugged in so he can watch the in-flight movie (a bit of soft-core porn featuring scantily clad women). All Dave wants to do on the flight is fall asleep and nap, but Buddy is so bothersome that Dave finally gives up on sleep and asks the woman flight attendant (Nancy Carell), for a headphone set of his own. She ignores him, he grabs her shoulder to get her attention, she accuses him of assault, and before long the situation has snowballed as a Black air marshal (Isaac C. Singleton, Jr.) on the plane has interpreted Dave’s reaction to him as a racist attack, Tased Dave and ordered the flight crew to return the plane to New York so Dave can be arrested for assault.

Dave, who’s represented by a Gay attorney named Sam (Kevin Nealon) – we get a few shots of him and his partner doing domestic things, and it’s a refreshing change from all the movies I’ve seen in which we’re told characters are Gay but we never see them doing anything sexual or even romantic with someone of their own gender – is assured he’ll get off, but the judge in the case, Brenda Daniels (Lynne Thigpen in her last movie; she died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 54 after she finished this movie but before it was released, and it was dedicated to her memory), sentences Dave to 20 hours of anger-management training. Unfortunately for Dave, the teacher of the anger management class is Buddy Rydell, whose obnoxious behavior on the plane got Dave into this mess in the first place. He's a licensed psychotherapist and author of a self-help book called Know Buddy Cares, and like most movie psychotherapists he’s also batshit crazy himself. The fellow students in Dave’s anger management class are pieces of work in themselves, including Nate (Jonathan Loughran), who appoints himself Dave’s version of an A.A. sponsor; Stacy (Krista Allen) and Gina (January Jones), a Bisexual couple who work in straight porn (they’re together as Lesbians but they often invite men over for three-ways, at least some of whom are also professional colleagues in porn, and they ended up in anger management when they literally nailed shut the mouth of a male porn performer who violated their threesome rules); and Lou (Luis Guzmán), a Latino hunk who dresses in see-through clothing and is pretty obviously meant to be Gay. Nate invites Dave to go to a bar with him and the two get into a fight with a blind man and another companion, and as a result Dave is arrested again and Judge Daniels sentences him to 30 days during which Buddy will not only treat him for anger issues but will literally live with him.

I wondered if writer Dorfman was thinking of Dr. Eugene Landy, the celebrated therapist-turned-creep who inflicted a similar level of control over his most famous patient, Beach Boys’ leader Brian Wilson, and ultimately so traumatized Wilson that when they were making the biopic Love and Mercy Wilson literally started screaming at actor Paul Giamatti, who was playing Dr. Landy in the film. Dr. Landy ultimately lost his medical license when he started taking cut-in credits as collaborator on Wilson’s songs and went into business with him, which is a bozo no-no in medical ethics. Anyway, one more strand of Anger Management’s plot concerns Linda (Marisa Tomei), who’s Dave’s girlfriend (though he’s so intimidated by his childhood fears he won’t kiss her in public); and Andrew (Allen Covert), a co-worker of Dave’s and also Linda’s ex, and naturally he wants to get rid of the “ex” part. When Dave and Andrew end up peeing next to each other in the company restroom, Dave is amazed at the size of Andrew’s dick, and while where I was expecting to go is that Andrew would punch him out thinking that Dave was making a Gay pass at him, instead this just gives Dave one more reason to feel inferior. There’s also a scene in which Buddy takes Dave out cruising for prostitutes but the only ones they come across, thanks to where Buddy has picked, are male cross-dressers, including one called “Galaxia” (Woody Harrelson). At one point Dave receives a call from a Boston hospital that Buddy’s mother is going in for surgery. Dave sees this as an opportunity to get away from Buddy’s suffocating presence for at least two days, but Buddy insists that the two drive to Boston together and along the way sing the song “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story (composed by real-life Bisexual Leonard Bernstein to a lyric by real-life Gay man Stephen Sondheim). When the two arrive Buddy is furious that his mom’s surgery was very minor and he’s upset with Dave for dragging them both out of New York on a wild-goose chase.

While they’re in Boston Buddy tries to set up Dave with a blonde bimbo named Kendra (Heather Graham). Buddy gives Dave a pickup line that sounds absolutely tasteless but unexpectedly works, and the two are in Kendra’s home getting ready to have sex when her underwear is emblazoned with the Boston Red Sox logo and Dave, a hard-core New York Yankees fan, is immediately turned off. Also there’s a sequence in which Buddy’s and Dave’s SUV is parked from getting out by a Lexus parked in front of them in the same garage, and Buddy’s reaction (this from a man who’s supposed to be teaching other people how to control their anger, remember?) is first to smash its windows and ultimately knock it off the balcony of the parking garage. (Charles was puzzled at the screen credit for a Rotoscope artist; Rotoscoping is usually a technique designed to fit live-action footage into a cartoon by tracing the live actors until they look like animated drawings. He finally guessed that the sequence that involved Rotoscoping was the one in which the car falls.) At one point Buddy announces to Dave that he’s traced his old childhood tormentor, Arnie Shankman, who’s now played by John C. Reilly and has become a Buddhist monk. Thanks to Buddy’s prodding, Dave and Arnie actually get into a fist fight on the monastery grounds, with the other monks looking on in radiant glee. Buddy ends the fight by pulling a gun on everyone, though it turns out just to be a water pistol. Alas, one of the turns the story takes is that Buddy persuades Dave to do a “trial separation” with his girlfriend Linda (ya remember Dave’s girlfriend Linda?), which will give them permission to date other people. At first we assume this means that Linda will get back together with her big-dicked ex Andrew, but instead it’s Buddy who ends up seducing Linda and announcing his intention to marry her.

He wants to have their proposal announced on the Jumbotron at Yankee Stadium (which still existed in all its 1920’s glory in this 2003 movie), and a furious Dave shows up determined to stop it. All sorts of real-life celebrities show up, including New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (back when he was still widely respected as “America’s Mayor” for the way he’d handled the 9/11 attacks, and well before he sold his soul to Donald Trump and degenerated into the gargoyle he is today) and opera singer Robert Merrill (there to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” though we never get to hear him actually do that and I was a bit disappointed because I’d been hoping to hear a sample of his voice as it stood in 2003 instead of his glory years at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1950’s and 1960’s), as well as several players from the real-life New York Yankees at the time. Ultimately Buddy agrees to relinquish Linda back to Dave if Dave will kiss her in public for at least five seconds, and [spoiler alert!] it turns out that the whole thing has been a set-up cooked up by Buddy and Linda to get Dave to overcome his fear of public displays of affection and propose to Linda at long last. I was a bit disappointed by this not very surprising “surprise” ending – where I thought this was going was that Dave would accumulate enough tapes of Buddy’s unorthodox “therapy” methods that Buddy would lose his medical license, while Dave and Linda would end up living happily ever after – but overall I enjoyed Anger Management. It’s true that after a week that began with Charles and I watching Charlie Chaplin in The Immigrant and Buster Keaton in Sherlock, Jr. just about any modern-day comedy would pale by comparison (I remember thinking, “How dare he?,” when Adam Sandler remade Gary Cooper’s role in a new version of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town), but I found Anger Management genuinely funny and entertaining, though as Charles said when it was over, “I think you liked it a lot better than I did!”