You Don’t Mess With the Zohan

You Don’t Mess With the Zohan

Directed by Dennis Dugan

(PG-13)

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An Israeli commando comes to America to become a hairstylist.

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You Don’t Mess With the Zohan is “better than most” Adam Sandler movies, said Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times. That’s not saying much. Here Sandler is Zohan, a buff and blow-dried Israeli counterterrorist agent who migrates to New York to fulfill his dream of becoming a hairdresser. Sandler and his co-writers, Judd Apatow and Robert Smigel, try to make light of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its attendant stereotypes. But their scattershot strategy “misses more than it hits,” descending quickly into hummus jokes, crude sexual humor, and inane homophobia. Zohan’s just out for a “good, slightly silly, time,” said Richard Schickel in Time. It largely delivers, and the “sheer good nature of all concerned disarms the movie’s constant bad taste.” Once you accept that it’s all in good fun, you’ll realize Zohan is the “finest post-Zionist action-hairdressing sex comedy” ever, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. Forget the United Nations. When it comes to reconciliation in the Middle East, Sandler and company suggest “there’s no match for the forces of sex, money, celebrity, and exuberant, unapologetic stupidity.”