Hummus hijinx

>>Adam Sandler fumbles the touchy subject of Israel in You Don’t Mess With the Zohan

by MARK SLUTSKY

God help us, Adam Sandler has made his Munich. Much like Steven Spielberg attempted to deal with his anguish over violence, retribution, the Israeli national identity and its relation to Jews everywhere by making a tense and mournful suspense film, Sandler confronts those same issues with dick jokes, sex jokes and hummus jokes in You Don’t Mess With the Zohan. This is a very weird movie.

Written by Sandler, longtime Saturday Night Live and Late Night With Conan O’Brien scribe Robert Smigel and the ubiquitous Judd Apatow (man that dude is everywhere now), Zohan stars Sandler as an Israeli super-agent who’s gotten tired of the fighting.

Despite his superhero-like powers, what he’s really interested in is becoming a peaceful hairstylist, so he fakes his death, moves to New York, and happens to find a job in a salon belonging to hottie-of-Palestinian-descent Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui, hottie-of-Canadian-descent and Entourage regular).

There he becomes famous for servicing the elderly clientele in every way you could imagine in an Adam Sandler movie—Zohan is also his Shampoo. Throw in a greedy land developer, John Turturro as Sandler’s old nemesis and the legacy of decades of bitter strife and you have a really unsettling comedy.

Sandler pounds home the why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along message with some force, and there’s no doubt his heart is in the right place. And there’s nothing wrong with finding humour in even the darkest of subjects: comedy is an acceptable response to tragedy and can be at its best more illuminative than a serious-minded approach. But this movie is juggling too much. It’s got an earnest, sensitive undercurrent that is painfully at odds with Sandler’s usual transgressive style.

Some jokes hit home, but at the same time this is a movie about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that never mentions checkpoints, walls, bomb belts, settlements. Who in their right mind would, in a big-budget Hollywood comedy? But then again, who would make a mainstream comedy about this stuff in the first place?

Judged on its own, if that’s even possible, this is a passable Sandler movie with some laughs and some gross-outs; as a comedy, it’s nothing special. As a statement, it’s well-intentioned, but awkwardly incomplete.

You Don’t Mess With the Zohan
opens this Friday, June 6

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