Featured Review: ZOHAN

You Don't Mess With The Zohan



Starring- Adam Sandler, John Turturro, Rob Schneider, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Nick Swardson, Lainie Kazan, Dave Matthews, Michael Buffer




Directed by Dennis Dugan



Grade: F




"Let me give her a cut and a bang."

The official title is simply, You Don't Mess With The Zohan. Given the many jokes about Middle Eastern linguistics in the film, perhaps the title is a play on what the real meaning of it should be; You Don't WANT To Mess With The Zohan. The film is as it describes- a mess- both in the humor it tries to find and the story it tries to play out. Personally, of all of Adam Sandler's mainstream films, only Little Nicky fails to inspire more than Zohan.

Like his other Saturday Night Live counterparts still making films (Mike Myers, Will Ferrell, Jimmy Fallon etc), Sandler has a certain schtick (sorry for the Yiddish, but this is a film about Israel after all) we've come to expect from him. After awhile the same routine gets old, and it's usually refreshing to see a comedian take a new risk. In Zohan, Sandler DOES change his comedic personality. Probably the best part of the film is the fact he doesn't make goofy faces and go into screaming fits like most of his other characters.

But therein lies one of the major problems with the film. It's nearly two hours of Sandler trying to have a decent Israeli accent, and director Dennis Dugan attempting to make everyone and everything around Zohan feel authentically ethnic. Then they realize it's supposed to make people laugh, and by then it's too late. It's hard to see where co-writer Judd Apatow makes his mark here. None of it resembles the usual pathos that is seen in his films and television shows. Instead, Sandler and Robert Smigel's fingerprints are smudged all over it.

Whereas I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry was trying to be gay-friendly while being homophobic the first 75% of the film, Zohan could've used some pro-gay elements to highlight its camp. The Israeli and Palestinians love Mariah Carey. Zohan is a hairdresser in New York with a giant crotch bulge, and can catch fish with his ass. And yet the film spends much of its time following the Chuck & Larry formula, trying to build a concerning story of Middle Eastern life in America while mocking them incessantly.

The execution of the jokes is horrendous. Whenever there's a decent chance to laugh at something, there's way too many groaners and odd incidents that take the air out of your chuckles. The fascination with hummus? Hacky sack? Even Carey's cameo itself is extremely awkward. Perhaps these things could've been funny if better staged, but as it was they were thrown into the middle of scenes and failed to create any humor out of it. I won't ruin the other cameo surprises, but despite the name recognition, very few of them work out to the film's advantage.

Probably the worst scenes of Zohan is Sandler's presence with John Turturro, playing a Palestinian rival named The Phantom. Turturro can be a convincing actor in drama roles, but as Zohan (and his past role as the crazy government agent in last year's Transformers) proves, he's not very well suited for comedy. His character was mostly pointless, and Turturro's uneasiness only made his barbs with Sandler that much worse.

Sandler's chemistry with Emmanuelle Chriqui is flat as well. There seems to be a golden rule of thumb in all Sandler-produced films: the older he gets, the hotter his objects of affection become. In Zohan, she serves no purpose at all, except to perhaps prove Zohan isn't gay or just a purveyor of old women getting haircuts. Chriqui has no lines of mention at all, and is probably the least memorable of his leading ladies. She's just there.

You Don't Mess With The Zohan could've reasonably been a funny and biting satire on the Israeli/Palestinian/American conflict, but with Sandler's crew in charge, that's obviously too much to expect. Instead it's a crude, big budget knockoff of Borat that doesn't began to prove the racism and humor that Sasha Baron Cohen exhibited. When Rob Schneider is the funniest and most believable star of your film, you know you're in a mess. A Zohan kind of mess.