Feel like there's a gun to your head these days? Last week we had as appropriate a metaphor for wartime anxiety as any, the paranoia-in-a-box nervous breakdown of Phone Booth. This week we have Anger Management, which plays like a light dispatch from a Short Fuse Nation.

But before we discuss that new Adam Sandler-Jack Nicholson comedy, a quiz:

Which comedian is smartest?

A. Woody Allen.

B. Richard Pryor.

C. Adam Sandler.

D. Steve Martin.

If you answered C, immediately place this section of the newspaper in the recycling bin and drive to your neighborhood theater. You are review-proof.

Next: Which of the following doesn't belong?

A. Citizen Kane.

B. Vertigo.

C. The Sorrow and the Pity.

D. Happy Gilmore.

If you answered D, chances are you are either 1. awake or 2. considered a snob by those who might answer A, B, or C.

The point is: Adam Sandler is a one-man cultural DMZ. Make no mistake: You chose a side long ago, whether you knew it or not. And the side you picked revealed a lot about yourself, your taste, your likely reaction to the sight of a grown man with the halting voice of an 11-year-old repeatedly punching Bob Barker in the face. That is, until Sandler made Punch-Drunk Love - then glib conventional wisdom had to go and get all messy.

Now it's hard to see Sandler's boilerplate junk (nothing-matters attitude, homophobic undertones, nobody directors) the same way. My guess is his experience with director Paul Thomas Anderson, making an avant-garde romance that refocused his image and risked alienating his audience (and for the most part, succeeded), had that effect on Sandler, too.

The first scene in Anger Management, the latest straight-up Sandler comedy, produced by Sandler himself, feels both depressingly typical and promisingly atypical. The title itself is acknowledgement of some new burst of self-awareness. We find Sandler in an airport with almost the same kind of suit and passive-aggressive mumble we left him with in Punch-Drunk. It's as if he flew back from Hawaii with doe-eyed Emily Watson and, after a few days, ditched her, switched coasts, and shacked up with the equally lovey-dovey-eyed Marisa Tomei. Otherwise, not much changed. Sandler never lost his ambivalent shamble, or his head-bowed timidity. Only his zero-to-60 temper went underground.

We couldn't see what Watson saw in Sandler, and we can't see what Tomei sees in him either, other than the same unwavering, I-love-dorks acceptance every one of Sandler's beautiful movie girlfriends affords her man-child superstar. Now do you see the Sandler that Anderson saw? How dead-on he was about the narcissistic, childlike Sandler persona?

We can't help but notice it now. But admitting the problem, I guess, is the first step to a solution, and this time, the Sandler formula doesn't feel so tortured. What's different about Anger Management is it's good-natured and relatively thoughtful, fun even, the work of a man who was finally forced to see himself, and was embarrassed. The violent rages where people are beaten to a smack-downed pulp aren't quite as ugly, the ethnic stereotypes aren't quite so tedious. Sandler isn't quite so sleepy, or creepy. My estimate: Only 47.3 percent of the jokes are lame.

But if ever a film deserved to be graded on a curve, it's this one. I've always thought it would be nice to give a good review to an Adam Sandler comedy. Lo and behold, here it is: Sandler plays more soft-spoken than mentally challenged. If that sounds like a compliment, it is: Anger Management is the first Sandler comedy to come off like more than a superstar toying with studio money. He seems sincere, thoughtful even. He plays Dave Buznik, a mild-mannered clothing designer for overweight cats. The film is loaded with funny little details like that.

And director Peter Segal (Tommy Boy) is a hack to the bone, too. But he doesn't tinker with the Sandler formula so much as skip from gag to gag so breezily that we're an hour into this thing before realizing there's no story. But by that point, we don't care. The spark plug is Jack Nicholson in classic Mephisto mode, with sunglasses, that slow mid-'90s gravelly Nicholson drawl, a sinister grin, and even a bag full of golf irons just itching to be smashed across windshields. The entire film is like an extended riff on the famous table-clearing scene in Five Easy Pieces.

We just wait for the combustion, since that's what Nicholson and Sandler are most famous for anyway: getting pushed to Alert Status Red. The pair meet on a plane. As if to put a fine point on the new philosophical Sandler, we get the surreal experience of watching Nicholson watch the in-flight movie, the fifth-rate horndog heaven, Tomcats. Sandler's Buznik asks meekly for a pair of headphones, but complications ensue and within minutes, an air marshal is standing over Buznik and solemnly saying, “This is a very difficult time for our country.”

What's the rest about? Don't know, didn't care, so what. Buznik is put through a kind of broad comedy take on Martin Scorsese's After Hours, plunged through a Kafka-meets-Dr. Phil whirlybird. He is court-ordered to either jail or anger-management counseling, then made increasingly angry by angry people telling him to remain calm. Which he is. Nicholson leads the group. He takes the overdone Sandler role and sheds 20 years, while Sandler plays the straight man. Nicholson's Dr. Buddy puts Buznik on a 24-7 regimen to excise his “capacity for implosive rage.” This is the subtext of all Sandler films, but until Punch-Drunk Love you might have thought that Sandler confused subtext with that tunnel the A Train moves through.

Now he's found his muse, and it's his rage.

As for what Nicholson is doing here: It's the same reason the film (in a very typical bit of Sandlerish product placement) keeps returning to a shot of a U.S. Army billboard. Sandler is a demographic dream. He gives you instant currency with a young audience. That's why also along for quick paychecks are: Woody Harrelson, John Turturro, Rudy Giuliani, Bobby Knight, Heather Graham, John C. Reilly, and Derek Jeter. There is so much packed in, my only wish is that it were 30 minutes shorter and the Farrelly brothers choreographed the mayhem. They would have known how to snip out that 11th-hour sentiment. Leaving the theater, I heard a man say: “Well, it's no Punch-Drunk Love.” How strange. I think he meant that as a good thing.

First Published April 11, 2003, 12:12 p.m.