Third Party View

There’s this place, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, the Middle East. They’ve got a lot of problems over there, specifically, the whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yeah, it’s a big mess. The Israelis have themselves a little bit of land, but the Palestinians say it was theirs first. One side attacks the other, and then the other retaliates. Then the first guy has to retaliate for the retaliation. Well that can’t stand, so they retaliate against the retaliation’s retaliation and on and on. It just doesn’t stop, but luckily one man has the answer. His name? Adam Sandler. If you took that whole big mess and added sex, scat humor, hair dressing, Neosporin, Arabic soda and more hummus that you thought it was humanly possible to fit in one movie, you’d have You Don’t Mess with Zohan. It’s like Munich, but with laughs.

Zohan Divir (Adam Sandler) is an over sexed Israeli super commando, who even though he is an unstoppable terrorist killing machine, he is tired of fighting. He is a man with dreams of styling hair and just because he’s good at killing doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be allowed to make women “silky smooth”. He decides that during a fight with his Palestinian nemesis, The Phantom (John Turturro), to fake his own death and slip away to America. Once there, he gets a job in the only shop that will have him, unfortunately it is on the Palestinian side of the street. Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui), the shop’s beautiful owner, hires him despite the fact that land developers are raising her rent. Luckily, Zohan is as good at cutting hair as he was killing and his ability to leave his clients “satisfied” helps keep the shop open. Meanwhile, he is recognized by a man he once crossed and soon the Phantom is back, ready to finish what he started.

Adam Sandler is a man who revels in lowbrow humor and to his credit he’s pretty good at it. At a certain point in You Don’t Mess With Zohan you sort of expect to see an old lady get humped by his enormous package and you may not laugh every time you see it, but at some point in this movie, you will. I know I’m supposed to find John Turturro funny, but I don’t, not anymore at least. He was great in The Big Lebowski, OBrother, Where Art Thou?, and the earlier Sandler team-up, Mr. Deeds. Sadly, he’s fallen into the same trap that Christopher Walken has, which is they’ve realized that people find them funny and now they try way too hard to get laughs. It kind of ruins what was funny about them in the first place: Turturro casually throwing of silly characters and Walken’s naturally creepiness. Generally speaking, the jokes are spread around pretty evenly between the rest of the cast, including Rob Scheider, Ido Mosseri, and Nick Swardson, that is excluding Emmanuelle Chriqui, of course, who is mainly the eye candy love interest.

Somewhere about halfway through this film, something washed over me and my feelings towards this film began to change. I don’t know exactly what it was, but just the ridiculous nature of the whole thing slapped me in the face and I was won over. Don’t get me wrong, there are mostly a lot of bad, really obvious jokes here, but right next to them are things that will definitely have you laughing out loud. Sure, I don’t particularly find hummus as funny as I guess I’m supposed to, but on the other hand I get a kick out of the foreign soda Fizzy Bubbeleh. Michael Buffer and Mariah Carey weren’t that great, but Chris Rock’s small cameo had me laughing and Dave Mathews is hilarious as a redneck henchman. And lastly, Rob Schneider may not be the funniest guy on the planet, but his attempting to dial a Palestinian phone number is hilarious in a great antagonistic sort of way.

As earnest as its forced message may be, I don’t think You Don’t Mess with the Zohan is going to heal any old wounds. If the whole Israelis-Palestinian mess were actually about rich land developers and their hillbilly thugs wanting to turn the neighborhood into a mall, killing innocent puppies in the process then sure, maybe. As it is, there is a lot about this movie that just isn’t funny, but at the same time I laughed out loud on several occasions. Things may have been better if they focused more on the absolutely ridiculous and cut out some of the really lowbrow humor and hummus references. Seriously, there’s a lot of hummus. Overall, it’s not a great Sandler movie, but we aren’t in Little Nicky territory either.

B-