“Anger Management” is a film with tremendous talents and an occasional wit, when executed with a good deal of precision.

On the down side, it has a script that seems to be written by a focus group with short attention spans that just left a screening of “The Cable Guy.”

“The Cable Guy” was much-maligned by viewers, who voted with their feet and sank Jim Carrey’s winning streak. For Carrey, it was too smart for what teens had come to expect. The problem with “Anger Management” is just the opposite. It’s just too dumb, and too lost in creating quotes to show up in Instant Messenger profiles. A movie with Jack Nicholson, Marisa Tomei, and John C. Reilly should not rely on stupid motifs and unfunny cameos, including one that ought to remove any appreciation anyone has ever had for former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.

In “The Cable Guy,” Carrey played a mentally disturbed cable installer who gets himself deeply involved in a customer’s life, stealing his girlfriend, causing him to get arrested and so on. In “Anger Management,” Dr. Buddy Rydell (Nicholson) plays a seemingly insane anger management therapist who gets himself deeply involved in a court-ordered patient’s life, stealing his girlfriend, causing him to get arrested and so on. The patient, of course, is Sandler, who does his shtick solidly.

Sandler is typecast, but it’s him doing the typecasting, so no one has any obligation to feel sorry for him. Nicholson is funny, but lacks the restraint that perfected “About Schmidt” and “As Good As It Gets.” Frankly, he makes “Batman” look like a masterwork in subtlety in this film. But again, he’s not the problem. Reilly, whose appearance is ordinarily welcome in any movie, is placed in a scene that is funny only if we hadn’t seen painfully similar things in “The Waterboy” and “Happy Gilmore,” both of which did it better. John McEnroe, Bobby Knight and Woody Harrelson’s cameos are worse still.

All involved have done better things. Director Peter Segal’s equally hackneyed but far funnier “My Fellow Americans” is still a guilty pleasure. Sandler’s “Billy Madison” and “Happy Gilmore” are both funnier, albeit worse films.

The script, by first-time scribe David Dorfman, is full of holes, which would seem like a problem for another movie. In this one, the holes might be the best part of it. Everything that isn’t a void is full of scenes concocted and set in random order just so a few lines and genital references could make the script. A few, including an early remark about “national crisis,” work to perfection. But so many just fall with a thud, leaving Sandler and Nicholson to try and find something clever about one bizarre coincidence after another. In another film, you’d ask why Jack Nicholson is using an electric follicle stimulator that makes him look like the bride of Frankenstein’s monster. In this one, you’re just grateful that it stops with little fanfare.

Even worse, the fuel runs out after about 80 minutes. Normally, Sandler’s movies don’t clock much beyond that time span, and we learn why in “Anger Management.” At this point, it just seems like the screenwriter decided that there was no way to end the film without leaping into a dadaistic mish-mash of “West Side Story” and concepts inspired by hallucinogenic toads.

After about the thousandth twist in the already-threadbare plot, one just feels like calling it quits, throwing a chair through the window and telling the movie to cut out its “Mission: Impossible” face-removing gags. After about the third time a character says “Ha ha, I gotcha,” it becomes virtually impossible to not assume the film itself is a joke.

If it is, it’s not one worth repeating, especially not in a film that had the promise of Adam Sandler working with Jack Nicholson — his second bizarre choice after the moderately successful “Punch-Drunk Love.” There’s a lot of funny things in “Anger Management,” but it is not funny as a whole. The actors are sometimes funny, but the movie isn’t there to use them. To waste the time of gifted actors like this is no joke. It is something that will make viewers need to harness their own skills of anger management.