You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (film review; opens June 6)
Adam Sandler, a comic actor known for creating childish gags and playing outrageous characters, tackles world events and Middle East stereotypes with “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.” The wildly popular 41-year-old performer provides what might be the crudest PG-13 political spoof in Hollywood’s history.
But what can’t be ignored about the give-peace-a-chance comedy is its timely message about the need for compromise and peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Sandler must be credited for tackling a project that asks his fans to at least contemplate the explosive situation in the Middle East.
The comedy isn’t pretty in “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” but some of its sentiments about compromise, forgiveness and peace deserve applause.
The raunchy scenes, which revolve around Sandler’s character having loud and long sex with senior citizens who have been collecting Social Security since President George W. Bush’s father was in the White House, might shock viewers. Interestingly, Sandler and his co-writers, Judd Apatow (“Knocked Up”) and Robert Smigel (TV’s Triumph the Insult Comic Dog), actually use sex to empower the golden-years ladies in “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.”
At a time when older Americans are often too quickly dismissed as an unimportant part of society, the writers present the white-haired women as still-sexual beings whose raw passions would impress the bed-hopping Samantha Jones character on “Sex and the City.”
That pro-seniors message, however, won’t impress Sandler’s core young-male audience, and some viewers may find the film’s comedic approach to terrorism in terrible taste.
In “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan,” Sandler plays the title character, an extremely powerful Mossad agent who disappears from the Middle East so that he can re-emerge in the United States, assume a new identity and pursue his dream of being a New York hair stylist. Honest.
After landing a job at a struggling beauty shop owned by a pretty Palestinian woman, Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui of HBO’s “Entourage”), the disco-loving Zohan enhances his cut-and-curl special. He offers aging customers – in a spoof of “Shampoo” with Warren Beatty – carnal geriatric gyrations in the back room before they make their next appointment
The amorously charged Zohan, who refers to sex as “make sticky,” sees nothing wrong with what he views as a value-added physical encounter. Those interludes end when his former life as an Israeli agent resumes after an old Palestinian enemy, The Phantom (John Turturro of “Transformers”), surfaces in New York.
Thanks to low-budget, high-profit hits such as “Billy Madison,” “Happy Gilmore,” “The Waterboy,” “The Wedding Singer” and “Big Daddy,” Sandler has the clout to make any film and demand final cut. Not many actors possess the clout to convince a studio to finance something as simultaneously zany and offensive as “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” directed by Dennis Dugan (“I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry”).
Perhaps Sandler, who specializes in man-boy roles revolving around characters who have trouble growing up, believed his hard-core young-male fans would turn out for “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” laugh at the often-tasteless (including a needless attack on Chelsea Clinton), sometimes-cruel (such as a hacky-sack game with a cat) gags and perhaps walk away with a little love in their hearts for people of other cultures.
That good-vibrations feeling is a nice thought, but such positive intentions might get flushed away due to the preponderance of toilet gags in the intermittently funny, sometimes foul comedy in which Sandler often has his heart in the right place but his head up his you-know-where.
Postscript: Celebrities making cameo appearances include Kevin James, who co-starred with Sandler in “I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry,” former tennis champion John Enroe, Henry Winkler (TV’s “Happy Days”), rocker Dave Matthews, Kevin Nealon (“Weeds”), comic actor Chris Rock (“I Think I Love My Wife”), singer Mariah Carey (“Glitter”) and George Takei (“Star Trek”).
FILM REVIEW
“You Don’t Mess With the Zohan”
Grade: C+
Starring: Adam Sandler, Emmanuelle Chriqui and John Turturro; written by Sandler, Judd Apatow and Robert Smigel; directed by Dennis Dugan.
Running Time: 105 minutes.
Parental Guide: PG-13 rating (non-stop crude humor and elements, brief nudity, sex, harsh four-letter profanity).