You Don’t Mess With The Zohan has so many jokes about sex, male genitalia and homophobia, you have to wonder what star Adam Sandler is overcompensating for.
Sandler stars as Zohan – an Israeli Mossad agent who is the best anti-terrorism agent in all of the world. He’s a Jewish James Bond. However, he’s tired of fighting and wants to cut and style hair for his idol, Paul Mitchell. Zohan wants to make beauty not war! Finally fed up with battling his arch-nemesis, The Phantom (John Turturro), and never having any time for himself, Zohan fakes his own death, and sets off to New York City with his scissors, styling book and a dream. Will Zohan be a success? Will his ruse be uncovered? Will his past destroy his future? Over the past few years, Sandler has made valiant strides towards taking material with more maturity, which showed off his acting skill (which actually exist when he wants to use it). However, after movies like Reign Over Me, Spanglish, Click and Punch Drunk Love didn’t become as big as Happy Gilmore, You Don’t Mess With The Zohan is a return to bawdy, teen boy humor that goes too far in its vulgarity and crassness. You Don’t Mess With The Zohan is a 2-hour opus of sex, sex, sex, sex, sex and more sex. It’s the same innuendos and more obvious non-innuendos over and over again turning Zohan into a cheap imitation of Borat, when the story idea and character concept aren’t all that bad when you think about it. Writers Sandler, Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow throw in some funny stuff about Zohan’s love for Israeli food and products that make us a giggle at how different they are from what we are familiar with, and I like seeing some of the greatest TV stars ever show up in cameos (with so many cameo appearances, you might think you are watching American Idol), but the team mostly relies on childish junk. You Don’t Mess With The Zohan lacks a positive energy and (dare I say) innocence Borat had to win us over, even if Borat was a movie that wasn’t shy about its use of the dirty stuff. This movie aggressively attacks the audience, and even tries to convince us that women think Zohan is sexy because he can catch things with his ass. Sandler wildly overstuffs his pants to make him look like a woman who is 5 months pregnant. He makes Zohan into a stylist who is known for servicing his clientele of women in their 60’s and 70’s, but the service extends beyond hairstyling. He shakes his nether regions around at every opportunity, and rubs them against people just as often. Even drunken frat boys will be screaming, “Enough already, we get it!” It’s just one nasty, horrifying sex joke after another where subtlety has been bound, gagged and throw into the trunk of some car (probably Sandler’s Ferrari, which he drives as he laughs all the way to the bank). Then, when Sandler, Smigel and Apatow need an ending to the movie, they toss in a lame plot about gentrification of the neighborhood by a ridiculous Donald Trump knockoff. It’s just not crazy enough to match the rest of the movie. I don’t know how this one got a PG-13. It should be R. You Don't Mess With The Zohan is rated PG-13 for crude and sexual content throughout, language and nudity.
