You Don't Mess With The Zohan	by M. Faust

Where did people vent before the internet? Movie buffs online are going apoplectic these days over two things: whether or not it’s insulting for Robert Downey Jr. to be doing blackface in the upcoming Tropic Thunder, and whether Adam Sandler has gone too far with his new comedy You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, in which he plays an Israeli counterterrorism commando who moves to Manhattan to become a hair stylist.

Of course, the bulk of these complaints come not from people who have actually seen either movie, but who are reacting to the films’ trailers, or what they’re heard about the trailers, or what they’re heard from someone who read a rumor on a blog about what was in the original script. Still, there are Sandler fans—people who actually liked Billy Madison—who went to early screenings of Zohan and thought it was awful.

To each his own. I’m not a big Sandler fan, but I laughed loud and long at Zohan.

Does that mean that this is a different kind of Adam Sandler movie, one that marks a change of pace from his usually brand of idiot comedy? Not really—it’s still pretty broad stuff, filled with stereotyped characters and crude gags and smutty humor. (It’s about the filthiest movie ever to somehow get a PG-13 rating.) It was made with all of his usual collaborators: directed by Dennis Dugan (Happy Gilmore, Big Daddy), and co-written by Sandler with Robert Smigel (former Saturday Night Live writer and creator of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog) and some guy named Apatow.

So why did this one work? Maybe because it does go so far over the top. Your average Sandler comedy casts him as a guy that we’re expected to accept as more or less average, even if he falls well short of a triple digit IQ.

Zohan is not one of those kind of guys. He’s a cartoonishly gifted warrior who has all the moves of a kung fu hero. His skills at combating terrorists has made him a legend in Israel. But he’s sick of all the fighting, which seems to him to be an endless treadmill. He wants out so he can pursue his dream, nurtured by the 1987 Paul Mitchell hair styling manual he keeps hidden in his bedroom.

A running gag through the movie is that contemporary Israeli pop culture looks like the US during the 1980s heyday of Miami Vice and the disco resurgence. The wardrobe that makes him hot stuff at home is a whole lot less au courant in Manhattan, where he comes to start a new life. (Not that this bothers him—part of the character’s appeal is that he’s utterly self-confident without being smug.)

So eager to please is Zohan that when he finally gets a chance to cut hair at a struggling Manhattan salon that caters to older women, he happily goes the extra mile. Even a shampoo from him looks like something from a Skinemax late night movie. How can I put this…after he’s done, instead of them giving him a tip, he gives the tip to them. (Bada-BOOM!)

But let’s get to the hard part. This is a movie that asks you to laugh at characters who are involved in one of the most hotly contested struggles in modern history. The salon where Zohan finds a job is run by a Palestinian woman (played by Emmanuelle Chriqui, of French and Moroccan heritage). You will not be surprised that our hero encounters other people of both Israeli and Arab heritage in New York, or to hear that the movie contains a finale in which everyone accepts that they are more similar than different. This extends to Zohan’s chief nemesis, a terrorist known as The Phantom (John Turturro), who has his own reasons for wanting to start a new life.

I won’t deny that you have to watch this with a certain suspension of disbelief. You’re going to have to pretend for two hours that these guys on both sides of this struggle may fight each other and hate each other, but that they don’t actually kill each other. (It may be a slim difference, but Zohan is not, as a lot of the gripers are complaining, a Mossad agent,)

Does the movie caricature Arabs? Sure, sometimes ridiculously so. The nadir is casting Sandler bud as Rob Schneider as an Arab cabdriver who, it is implied, had a bit too personal of a relationship with his goat.

But it caricatures Israelis just as broadly. I’m of the school that holds that if you’re going to indulge in egregious ethnic stereotypes, you have to apply them across the board. You might argue that all of these characters are simply the same cliché that goes back to the way Hollywood used to portray Italians (loud voices, hokey accents, endless gesticulation—Chico Marx, after all, was really a Jewish guy named Leonard). But it’s a lot less mean-spirited than, say, Borat. If you want to chose to be offended by it, I can’t say that you don’t have a point. But if you can accept that it essentially has its heart in the right place, I think you’ll laugh plenty.

Of course, you’re talking to someone who laughed at Little Nicky, too.