You Don’t Mess with the Zohan

*1/2 Stars

Adam Sandler has never looked better in any movie. He is fit, he is lean, and he still gets the hot girl. But a good looking Adam Sandler does not necessarily create a good looking movie. You Don’t Mess with the Zohan is a stale and an obsessively unfit comedy for the world we live in.

It’s a strange dilemma. Adam Sandler sure has made some stinkers (including this one), but I am still at the theater on the opening nights of his films. He’s like a girl you can’t stop hooking up with every time you see her. Sandler has just received MTV’s highest honor for comedy at the Movie Awards last week. His years of offensive screwball films have captured the hearts of frat boys and pre-teenagers all over the world. Audiences also know that he can act. His two best performances were dramas: Punch Drunk Love and Reign Over Me. I am sad to report that Zohan is on the same level as I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, as one of Sandler’s worst films.

The movie, co-written by Judd Apatow, Sandler, and Robert Smigel, is trying too hard to make us laugh. Sandler plays a Mossad agent named Zohan Dvir, who is tired of fighting as an Israeli assassin. He decides to fake his own death to travel to New York City so he can achieve the American Dream. A dream of cutting and stylizing hair. I guess we all have a little Sex and the City in us. Even Adam Sandler.

When he gets to New York, he takes a job at a salon where of course it is run by a hot Palestinian girl (Entourage’s Emmanuelle Chriqui). Where would the world be without a little Isreali-Palestinian humor? That humor in this film has sent their people back a thousand years. So does that mean the war has just begun?

That was a little harsh. But come on, there is no point to this movie except to give Sandler more strong box-office numbers. Why doesn’t Sandler take a stretch before running the same course over and over? My advice to him is to ditch the same old crew consisting of another Razzie-caliber performance by Rob Schneider and the sadly miscast John Turturro, and collaborate with his old college roommate (Apatow) respectively and make a comedy classic of Superbad, Knocked Up, and 40-Year Old Virgin like proportions. If not, I really don’t think Sandler can keep making me hook up with that same old dud.