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You Don't Mess with the Zohan Our rating: Rate this movie   MPAA rating: PG-13 (for crude and sexual content throughout, language and nudity) Genre: Comedy Theater release: June 06, 2008 by Columbia Pictures Directed by: Dennis Dugan Runtime: 1 hour 53 minutes Cast: Adam Sandler (Zohan), John Turturro (The Phantom), Emmanuelle Chriqui (Dalia), Nick Swardson (Michael), Lainie Kazan (Gail), Ido Mosseri (Oori), Rob Schneider (Salim), Dave Matthews (James), Michael Buffer (Wallbridge), Charlotte Rae (Mrs. Greenhouse) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Recent attempts to tackle the Middle East on film have been, shall we say, less than successful, certainly in box-office terms. Moviegoers didn't seem to mind watching soldiers run around the desert in an overpriced popcorn movie like Transformers, but the moment things turned serious or dramatic, as they did in such very topical films as Rendition, Stop Loss and Lions for Lambs, audiences stayed away in droves.

So now filmmakers are trying a different approach: comedy. From Morgan Spurlock's documentary Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, which didn't make much of an impression, to the stoner sequel Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, which earned more than twice as much as the first Harold & Kumar film did, the studios are taking a page from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and hoping that war-weary audiences will at least be ready to laugh at the world's problems.

Adam Sandler as Zohan

Enter You Don't Mess with the Zohan, which stars Adam Sandler as a sort of "superheroic" Israeli counter-terrorism agent whose ridiculously over-the-top skills—punching through walls, catching bullets in his nose, doing push-ups with nothing more than his feet touching the ground, and so on—are more cartoonish than anything else. The funny thing is, Zohan is sick of fighting Palestinians and wants to quit it all so that he can be a hairdresser. That's right, a hairdresser. And he even fakes his death—or, rather, allows his fellow Israelis to think he has been killed—so that he can run away to America and get a job in a hair salon, where it turns out he has an irresistible sexual appeal to the older female clientele.

Veering from something as serious as the Middle East to something as relatively frivolous as hairstyling and promiscuous sex is either daring or offensive, depending on your point of view. But it certainly fits the sensibility of Sandler, a proud Jew (think "The Hanukkah Song") with a pronounced political streak (think the pro-Giuliani and pro-gay marriage messages in I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry) who also revels in some of the stupidest frat-boy and below-the-belt humor ever seen on the big screen (think, oh, just about every Sandler film ever made—not counting his rare, and surprisingly effective, turns as a dramatic actor in Reign Over Me, etc.).

The film actually begins with the silly stuff, as Zohan (Sandler) struts his stuff on a beach, wins ridiculously lop-sided games of tug-of-war, does some barbecuing in the nude, and throws things in the air using his, um, rear-end muscles. But then his vacation is cut short when a helicopter comes to pick him up and bring him back to headquarters for an emergency assignment. It seems a terrorist named The Phantom (John Turturro)—who was once caught by Zohan, but was returned to the Palestinians by the Israelis as part of a prisoner-exchange deal—is wreaking havoc again, and a frustrated Zohan volunteers once again to catch the guy.

Emmanuelle Chriqui as Dalia, the owner of the hair salon

This leads to some bizarre gags that either satirize the way the Israeli situation has been trivialized and turned into cliché by the media, or contribute to that sad trivialization, depending on how you see it. For example, as Zohan chases the Phantom, a bunch of children throw rocks at the Israeli counter-terrorist—and he catches them all and fuses them all together and hands them back in the shape of a dog, the way a clown might get animal shapes out of a string of balloons.

But then Zohan moves, incognito, to the United States, and learns that the only salon that will have him in any capacity happens to be on the Arab side of the street, across from the Israeli shops. Zohan is suspicious, but Oori (Ido Mossri), an Israeli émigré who recognizes Zohan, assures him that everyone gets along in America. And there, Zohan—who has already had sex with his roommate's mother (Lainie Kazan) to thank her for dinner—begins coming on to the female clients, starting with a woman played by Charlotte Rae, the 82-year-old former Facts of Life star.

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