You Don't Mess With the Zohan

Adam Sandler has been taking himself too seriously these days, even in his comedies. When his 2006 hit, Click, took a sudden and unexpected turn toward depression, life lessons, and melodrama in its last half hour, I almost started to miss the guy from Happy Gilmore who got in fights with Bob Barker. You Don't Mess With the Zohan is a loopy, if not uneven, comedy that seems lifted directly from his days on Saturday Night Live. The fact that Sandler wrote the film himself, along with former SNL writer, Robert Smigel, and superstar comedy filmmaker and producer, Judd Apatow (Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall), lets you know that he is trying to regain some of the fanbase he may have lost over the years. While not entirely successful, and attached with an overly bloated two hour running time, Zohan is the most fun I've had watching a Sandler comedy in a while.

His title character is an Israeli counter-terrorist officer who is just as skilled with the ladies as he is at catching criminals and terrorists. Considering that this is a guy who can make superhuman leaps alongside buildings, catch bullets up his nose, and dismantle guns with his bare hands (then turning them into balloon animal shapes for the kids watching nearby), that's saying something. Zohan, however, is tired of his current life. Keeping the peace is great and all, but when he's alone, he clutches a late 1980s hair styling book close to his chest, and dreams of being a stylist in America. When he is sent on a mission to re-capture his arch nemesis, a terrorist who goes by the name of The Phantom (John Turturro, appropriately hamming it up and having the time of his life), Zohan sees an opportunity to fake his own death and start a brand new life. He smuggles himself on board a plane bound for New York by hiding in a dog carrier, and assumes a new identity named after the two dogs he was traveling with. Under the name "Scrappy Coco", Zohan is determined to make a name for himself.

Obviously, life in the US is hard for a Middle Eastern foreigner, and he can't seem to find work unless he wants to sell generic overpriced electronics or drive a cab. Eventually, he is able to find a hair salon willing to take a chance on him, run by a beautiful and down on her luck woman named Dalia (Emmanuelle Chrique from TV's Entourage). He starts out as a lowly hair sweeper, but he soon gets a chance to prove both his skills as a stylist and as a pleasurer of women. His process of cutting hair is like a cross between intercourse and Barber College. When his work with the hair is finished, he takes his customers into the back room for wild sex that shakes the very foundation of the salon itself. Word spreads, women start lining up outside the door, and Zohan is soon in danger of having his past catching up with him when a cab driver from his home country (Rob Schneider) recognizes him, and informs The Phantom of where his former enemy is residing. The Phantom, having opened up a chain of fast food restaurants overseas, drops everything to head for America for the final confrontation.

There's also a romantic subplot that develops between Zohan and Dalia, as well as another subplot about a greedy land developer tycoon (Michael Buffer) who is trying to spark riots in the ethnic neighborhoods, so he can tear everything down and build a mall. None of this matters, obviously. You Don't Mess With the Zohan is really just a chance for Sandler to cut loose with a character in a way that he hasn't been able to in quite a while, have a lot of fun with some of his former friends from his Saturday Night Live days, and throw a bunch of goofy jokes up on the screen, hoping that they will stick. The movie seems willing to do just about anything for a laugh, and although the humor isn't always politically correct (lots of jokes about Middle Easterners being obsessed with hummus to the point that they brush their teeth with it), I admired that the writers actually tried. A lot of the jokes fall flat, but there are some genuine laughs throughout, and I found myself smiling a lot more than I probably should have. When The Phantom prepares for his final battle with Zohan, we get a warped Rocky-style training montage where he cracks a couple of eggs into a glass, some baby chicks drop into the glass, and then he swallows the chicks whole. I admit it, I laughed. Later in that same sequence, The Phantom is punching various slabs of meat on hooks for his training, only to find a live cow hanging upside down on one of the hooks, and he punches that as well. If you don't laugh at the sight of a man punching a cow hanging upside down from the ceiling, you've lost your sense of the absurd.

Sandler earns some laughs of his own as well, and makes Zohan into a likable comic creation. In a role that could have easily been broadly overplayed or annoying, he turns the character into a charming innocent who just happens to have the agility of Spider-Man, and the sleuthing and sexual abilities of five James Bonds. His superhuman acts of heroism and pleasing women are wisely never explained. We're just expected to go with it, and we do, because Sandler plays Zohan as a regular guy. His abilities are second nature to him, so he does not see it as showing off. It's a fun character, and he's obviously having a lot of fun playing him. That being said, the character isn't quite good enough to carry a movie as long as this. This really does feel like an over extended idea from his sketch comedy days, and the goofy charms of Zohan and the movie itself can only take it so far. The themes of racial bonding, racial discrimination, and ordinary people coming together are not quite as heavy-handed as in some of Sandler's recent message comedies, but they still seem out of place in a movie where early on, Sandler drops a piranha down his pants and lets it attack his crotch without any display of pain just to show how strong he is. I also think it should be a written law that a movie that is not even remotely interested in its own plot should not stretch longer than 90 minutes (and even that is pushing it). The film's two hour running time stretches the movie to ridiculous lengths that it cannot reach.

Sometimes a movie like You Don't Mess With the Zohan just catches me in the right mood. Last time I found myself laughing more than I probably should have was last year's Balls of Fury. I admitted that Balls worked in a guilty pleasure sort of way and, despite this film's obvious flaws, so does Zohan to an extent. The energy level dips from time to time, but there's always something waiting that will pick up the pace. It's not a great movie, and I may hate myself in the morning for saying I liked it, but I don't care. The movie left me with a goofy grin on my face, and for a comedy as intentionally dumb as this, that's rare.

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