WATCHING Adam Sandler knocking the stuffing out of goofball comedy usually leaves this reviewer requiring anger management. So too did the absurd praise heaped on Sandler's detour into arthouse cinema in Paul Thomas Anderson's Chinese torture show, Punch Drunk Love.

Hence the sight of Jack Nicholson giving Sandler hell is music to the ears, or at least it is for as long as Jack has the upper hand in this riff on that old comic staple: the battling odd couple.

Fun and games, even John McEnroe and NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani cameos lie in store, until Nutty Professor 2 and Naked Gun 33 1/3 director Peter Segal runs out of steam and follows the road sign marked Predictable Hollywood Finale.

In Sandler's latest variation on his mild-mannered man pushed to regrettable reactions, he plays Dave Buznik, a put-upon, non-confrontational business executive, busy developing a line in clothes for fat cats - a gag that runs gleefully throughout the movie. He has a girlfriend (Marisa Tomei) but he keeps falling short of popping the question, proof that he may require assertiveness training.

Certainly, that is the interpretation of unconventional clinical psychiatrist Dr Buddy Rydell (Nicholson), to whom Buznik is assigned after an in-flight argument leads to him being charged with assaulting a stewardess in these politically correct, post-9/11 paranoid times.

His anger is implosive - the really dangerous kind, apparently - and now it is time for the implosive to meet the explosive methods of the radical Rydell, who moves in to his reluctant patient's apartment to follow his every step 24 hours a day.

This one-on-one therapy stretches as far as sharing the bed and stealing his girlfriend, the cue for Nicholson in beret and beard to do his devilish grin, twitch his eyebrows, hot-chat the girl and take top prize in the over acting honours. A less demonstrative Sandler, below, meanwhile, conveys the average Joe's helpless struggle against the new world of new soft men, the rising tide of therapy treatment and the spread of PC values.

Segal takes a particularly lads' magazine stance on all this, Heather Graham and Tomei being lumbered with female stereotypes whereas the male cameos are top notch with a transvestite Woody Harrelson, John C Reilly as a Buddhist monk with a bully-boy past and wacko John Turturro.

Hollywood cheese wins out in the end, an easy cop-out, but there can be no arguing with one Rydell bon mot: "Temper is the one thing you can't get rid of by losing it."

Updated: 10:00 Friday, June 06, 2003