One of my goals as a reviewer is to clearly and efficiently state my opinion on a movie. As such, let me sum up "You Don't Mess With The Zohan" in two sentences.
1. This "comedy" is the worst flick of the year so far.
2. It's lowest common denominator filmmaking, and I would rather watch late-night public access TV with my eyelids stapled shut while being water-boarded than sit through this movie again.
The plot, if you can call it that, focuses on the Zohan (Adam Sandler), Mossad's top agent, who fakes his death and defects to New York City in order to become a hair-stylist under the alias "Scrappy Coco." If that last bit made you chuckle, then this is the movie for you, and may God have mercy on your soul.
I don't like to get this hostile over cinema. With regard to movie preferences, "to each their own," I've always thought. But this flick is so bad I have to seriously question the livelihood of those who can enjoy it. This isn't one of those movies you have to shut your brain off to enjoy. I can deal with those. This is a "You Must Be This Brain-Damaged to Ride" kind of flick. And those are rare.
But you know what? So is Ebola, and no one goes around recommending that either.
"You Don't Mess With The Zohan" would be offensive if it weren't so stupid. You've got the entire Israeli/Palestinian conflict played solely for lowbrow laughs; those two ethnic groups speak in indecipherable accents and prance around like third-rate Borats.
Male hairdressers are automatically assumed to be gay, and if they're not, the other characters mock their sexuality incessantly. If there was any real humor or craft to this stuff, it could be funny, but here it's all delivered with the crassness of an exceptionally dirty-minded eleven-year old.
The one saving grace of the flick is that, in the real world, people might find this stuff offensive, and no element of Sandler's flick occupies the real world as we know it.
I'm used to a certain degree of surreal non-sequitors when dealing with an Adam Sandler movie (heck, Chris Farley making out with the imaginary penguin in "Billy Madison" is still one of the funniest things I've ever seen), but this time he just goes overboard. Terrorists with their own fast food chains? An Israel stuck in Miami Beach culture, circa 1984? International Hacky-Sack Tournaments?
Take that, and couple it with the same four jokes repeated ad nauseum. Here's what I imagine the script looked like for this one: Stupid setup. Hummus joke. Bizarre character. Reference to Sandler's genitals. "Wacky" pratfalls. Gay joke. Shot of Sandler pleasuring an old woman. Occasionally toss in random cameo star (Michael Buffer and Dave Matthews, I'm looking at you two). Repeat over the course of a soul-deadening 113 minutes.
Ho ho. That's comedy gold, I tell you.
Really? Is the comedy world this starved for ideas? No character in this movie comes close to displaying authentic human behavior. And if you can't connect with any of the characters or their situations, then…well…lots of luck to you.
I was done with this one about five minutes in, after the third shot of Sandler catching a foreign object in his butt cheeks. Unfortunately, that would not be the last time that joke appeared in the movie.
More than anything, the biggest crime of "You Don't Mess With The Zohan" is that it just isn't funny. I laughed at one joke. Gently chuckled at another. Smiled at a third. That's three jokes in two hours. It's the filmic equivalent of waking up in the hospital to hear the doctor tell you that you survived the car crash, but they had to take your legs.
It's a real shame, considering the talent behind the movie. Along with Sandler, Judd Apatow and Robert Smigel co-wrote the script. Apatow's a god, and Smigel comes pretty close (he's the creator of Triumph the Insult Dog and has written some classic SNL skits like "Canteen Boy"). Even the great John Turturro plays the villain.
I love Adam Sandler, too, and not just the pretentious artsy fellow from "Reign Over Me" and "Punch-Drunk Love." "Billy Madison," "Happy Gilmore," "The Waterboy," "Mr. Deeds," I can watch these over and over again, and I laugh my butt off every time. I am an Adam Sandler fan.
And he, like everyone else associated with the flick, is terrible. Just dreadful.
If we get a movie this bad this early in the year, I shudder at what the coming months will bring. This is a truly wretched film. I can't be more blunt than that.
As a comedy about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the best I can say about it is that it's about as funny as "Munich."
No, "Munich" was a little funnier.
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