Starring Adam Sandler, John Turturro. Written by Adam Sandler, Robert Smigel, Judd Apatow. Directed by Dennis Dugan. (14A) 112 min. Opens June 6.
I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry featured an impassioned plea by Adam Sandler — filmed head-on, as if directed at his teenage fan club — to stop using homophobic slurs. But we’re not 10 minutes into You Don’t Mess with the Zohan before Sandler’s eponymous hero — an impossibly limber Israeli special forces agent who secretly dreams of cutting hair like Paul Mitchell — has his sexuality laughingly questioned by his father. Sandler protests that he’s all man, but his pop will have none of it, chiding, “You’re just digging yourself deeper into your fagellah hole.”
This bit of backpedalling isn’t surprising, but Zohan has bigger fish to fry anyway: Sandler and his collaborators (including pet director Dennis Dugan and co-writer Judd Apatow) have attempted nothing less than a treatise on the futility of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — with dick jokes. It begins like a cartoon version of Munich, with Mossad and Hezbollah operatives engaging in turbo-charged Crouching Tiger–style combat, but once the scene shifts to New York — where Zohan has secretly relocated, Viggo Mortensen–style, to bury his violent past and pursue his stylist desires — we see that Middle Eastern émigrés of all backgrounds are just trying to make ends meet: the American melting pot as a healing bubble bath.
In between wooing his Palestinian hottie boss (Emmanuelle Chriqui) and banging the appreciative bubbies at the salon (as usual, for Sandler, there’s nothing funnier than horny old people), Zohan unites the various diasporas against a common enemy — a white real estate developer (natch). Zohan’s why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along exhortations are disarmingly sincere, but they’re also couched so deeply in Sandler-brand comic mediocrity that the gesture barely seems worth it.