Director: Dennis Dugan
Starring: Adam Sandler, John Turturro, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Nick Swardson, Lainie Kazan, Ido Mosseri, Rob Schneider, Dave Matthews, Charlotte Rae

- Reviewed by Vickie

Yeah. Zohan wasn’t zo great. At all. It was zo crappy.

Once again, Adam Sandler and company trot out a low-brow comedy that will probably delight his hardcore fans and amuse teenage boys. But for everyone else? Not so much.

This time, Sandler is the titular Israeli commando—a super-human one-man army, who’s amazing at everything, possesses unbelievable strength and agility, romances women with ease and can catch bullets with his nostrils. But even Superman needs a day off so, during a fierce “I feel less pain than you do” water battle with his arch-nemesis, a terrorist named The Phantom (John Turturro), Zohan decides to fake his own death and head to America to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a hairdresser.

Cue a pile of lame gay jokes. (Seriously? Still? In 2008? Come on.)

So, Zohan changes his name, stows away on a plane and arrives in New York City hoping to get a job at the Paul Mitchell salon. Instead, he’s taken in by geeky Michael (Nick Swarsdon, in another wonderfully insane role) and his randy mother (Lainie Kazan)... with whom Zohan promptly makes “the sticky”... and becomes an assistant at a tiny neighborhood beauty parlor owned by Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui). Soon, his skills with scissors are surpassed only by his insatiable libido and his willingness to have sex with scores and scores of the salon’s elderly patrons. Yes, folks, a de-facto gigolo bumping uglies with grandmothers is what this film relies on for its laughs.

The remainder of the story spirals out into several tangential but uninteresting directions, including the gentrification of the neighborhood by a nasty (but entirely forgettable and anonymous) developer, the Isreal/Palestine conflict as reflected in the community residents—not the least of which is a hot-headed cab driver named Salim (Rob Schneider) intent on bringing down “the Zohan”—and Israeli Zohan’s growing attraction to Palestinian Dalia.

For me, very little of the film actually worked. In addition to Sandler’s horrendous accent—which doesn’t sound Isreali so much as it sounds like Catface—and the sloppy screenplay, much of the film just forges ahead pointlessly. There’s an entire inexplicable sequence where, out of nowhere and for no clear reason, Zohan poses as a limo driver to haul cameo-star Henry Winkler around town in a white-knuckle car ride to a groundbreaking ceremony. Why? So we could have the requisite bodily fluid joke thrown in? Winkler isn’t the only celeb dropping in, either. Chris Rock, Kevin Nealon, Dave Matthews and Mariah Freakin’ Carey (?!) all appear. It felt a bit like some studio exec was holding them to some fine print on contracts they signed years ago.

I didn’t think it was funny when the guys in the film played hackey sack with a cat. I didn’t laugh when Charlotte Rae (TV’s Mrs. Garrett) waits for Zohan to get it up. I rolled my eyes at the gaysian stereotype and kept waiting for the movie to redeem itself. Needless to say, it never did.

The titles advises us that we shouldn’t mess with the Zohan, but perhaps you’d be better off not seeing the Zohan, either.

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