You Don't Mess With the Zohan.

"In a passable Israeli accent, outsize codpiece, and a new and improved bod, Adam Sandler's Zohan, a Mossad super-heavy, is every Jewish nerd's dream of self-transformation - until, that is, he has a career crisis and turns up in Manhattan as a would-be hairdresser in an awful 80s shag who falls for his Arab boss (Emmanuelle Chriqui) while heading off a simmering Israeli-Arab war among the expats in the 'hood," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "If nothing else - and there isn't much else - You Don't Mess With the Zohan pronounces the Middle East fair game for absurdist comedy."

Updated through 6/9.

"Nobody makes a movie as restless, freaky and all over the map as You Don't Mess With the Zohan unless they've got a hell of a lot on their mind," suggests Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "The film is a bloody mess, but it'll also never be confused with the sort of phoned-in star vehicle somebody of Sandler's stature could easily coast his way through. To paraphrase the late Spalding Gray: His subconscious is so close to the surface you can see its periscope."

"American diplomatic efforts have so far proved inadequate to the task of bringing peace to the Middle East, but You Don't Mess With the Zohan taps into deeper and more durable sources of American global power in its quest for a plausible end to hostilities," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Ancient grievances and festering hatreds are no match for the forces of sex, money, celebrity and exuberant, unapologetic stupidity. Zohan (Mr Sandler) certainly seems to think so, though he might express his views differently, and certainly with a thicker accent."

"This is a mighty hymn of and to vulgarity, and either you enjoy it, or you don't," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "I found myself enjoying it a surprising amount of the time, even though I was thoroughly ashamed of myself. There is a tiny part of me that still applauds the great minds who invented the whoopee cushion."

It's "the movie Munich should have been," argues Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "Steven Spielberg attempts to wrestle with some morally ambiguous issues, particularly the question of whether violence is ever morally justified, or necessary. But Spielberg tiptoes up to the complexity of those issues only to pull back from the edge." Zohan "is the braver movie, for the way Sandler uses throwaway humor in the service of a strong point of view."

"Sandler's films now seem to function mostly as a kind of philosophical experiment: How lazy, sloppy and stupid can a film be and still make money?" writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "And let's not mince words here, or hem and haw and add caveats about a few laughs or good intentions: You Don't Mess With the Zohan is astonishingly, impressively, depressingly bad."

"Zohan isn't pro-Israel or pro-Palestine; it's pro-America," writes Eric Kohn in a "Fan Rant" on Sandler's conservative politics at Cinematical: "There's nothing corrupt about Sandler promoting ethnic tolerance, even in a crass vehicle like this. At the same time, the zeal of its conclusion reads like the reductive "fair and balanced" mentality of a Fox newscast - it's a blind stab at pragmatism that doesn't exist."

"If this was to be unapologetically funny, likable in an un-ironic, non-guilty-pleasure way, You Don't Mess With the Zohan falls short," writes Mark Olsen. "As a cutting comedic satire about the Arab-Israeli conflict and stereotypes, it misses more than it hits. As another run-of-the-mill Sandler movie, it is better than most. At this point it seems a little foolish to want, let alone expect, 'more' from the guy. If he can't be bothered to put more effort into his films, why should anybody else?" Also in the Los Angeles Times: "It so happens that Sandler's own stylist, Yuki Sharoni, served as an Israeli soldier before moving to Los Angeles to open a salon." Nathaniel Popper reports. Also: Chris Lee profiles co-writer Robert Smigel.

The AV Club's Nathan Rabin finds Zohan "spectacularly, unimpeachably, relentlessly preposterous. In the hands of a crackpot genius like Stephen Chow, this cartoonish romp about a Mossad operative turned New York hairdresser might have been sublimely silly. In the hands of professional Sandler crony Dennis Dugan, it's merely amiably ridiculous."

Richard Schickel, writing in Time, finds that it "isn't quite as funny as it might be, but is as funny as it needs to be."

"Zohan "is such a witless, joyless, and cynically conceived enterprise that the film deserves to be discussed in movie critic clichés as conceptually threadbare as the misguided creative impetus that spawned it." Bruce Bennett proceeds accordingly in the New York Sun.

"Zohan is something of a let down for Sandler who recently has made bold, successful choices in the movies Spanglish, The Click [sic], Reign Over Me, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, where comedy revealed a recognizable deep longing and sadness—yet never turned mawkish." Armond White in the New York Press.

"If you're already wondering what gives the Zohan crew the right to tackle such sensitive subject matter, well, so are they." Dave Itzkoff talks with them for the Age.

Update: "[T]his new movie's scattershot approach to humor means that at least a few comedic targets are hit," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "But really - 113 minutes? Some judicious trimming might have made the jokes' hit-to-miss ratio way more tolerable."

Update, 6/9: "How does Sandler get by with narcissistic fantasies so far-out?" asks David Edelstein in New York:

One way is by turning them into camp, so that he seems to be satirizing the movie-star potency he's actually peddling. The art is in the balance. Sandler never falls into the Jerry Lewis mode of naked self-infatuation. Something fogbound in his demeanor takes the edge off his self-aggrandizement - a quality Paul Thomas Anderson exploited beautifully in Punch-Drunk Love, in which Sandler played an emotionally overdefended child-man who floated through the world in a solipsistic (but lyrical) bubble. Like Will Ferrell, Sandler has layers of tenderness under layers of irony under layers of tenderness—plus a floating anger like Jupiter's great red spot.

Posted by dwhudson at June 6, 2008 6:26 AM