You Don't Mess With The Zohan
- Film Worth:$6.50
- FILMINK rates movies out of $20 - the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Beneath the bad taste, bad hair, bad fake accents, butt jokes, dick jokes and sex-with-seniors...
Beneath the bad taste, bad hair, bad fake accents, butt jokes, dick jokes and sex-with-seniors gags, there's a peace message inside Adam Sandler's latest vehicle. The premise is nothing less than utterly ridiculous. Sandler is Zohan, an Israeli commando with virtual super-human powers who fakes his own death to go to New York to pursue his dream of becoming -wait for it- a hair stylist. But dreams don't come easy, and Zohan is laughed out of a trendy salon, and winds up working on the 'Palestinian side' of a New York street where he meets and falls for Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui). But his past tries to catch up with him in the form of Palestinian terrorist The Phantom, played with glee by John Turturro.
Sandler, who co-wrote this with comic-force-du-jour Judd Apatow (Knocked Up) and humourist Robert Smigel, takes a risk in making comedy out of the Middle East conflict. You'd expect political incorrectness, but instead there's a pleasantly PC element in the latter part of the film. The only seriously offensive moment is an indoor game of hacky sack using a CGI pet cat instead of a ball.
You Don't Mess With The Zohan is crude, too long, and only occasionally hilarious, but Sandler, who has a Jewish background, handles the politically sensitive aspects surprisingly well, all things considered. Sure, there are racial caricatures, but you could argue that Sandler's making a joke out of the stereotypes, rather than reinforcing them.
With big name cameos (Mariah Carey, Henry Winkler), this is big, bright, noisy - and too silly for the discerning viewer. And while there aren't enough laugh-out-loud moments, it's hard to suppress a smile as Zohan struts his stuff in the salon.
