You Don't Mess With the Zohan (Unrated Extended Single-Disc Edition)

If You Don't Mess with the Zohan feels like an extended and crazed sketch from Saturday Night Live, there are reasons for that. Zohan's star and SNL alumnus Adam Sandler is joined by several fellow cast members (in uncredited cameo roles) from his years on the NBC show. But Sandler also co-wrote the film's absurdist script with SNL veteran writer and sometime-performer Robert Smigel. Echoes of a few of their classic skits on the show--built around high-strung Israeli characters obsessed with disco and selling junk electronics out of a New York shop--are in revisited in Zohan and are a lot of fun to see again. Zohan is unbridled nonsense thrown at the wall, but with a sunny disposition that proves surprisingly persuasive. Sandler stars as an Israeli intelligence operative who fakes his death to reinvent himself in New York City as a hairdresser. Putting the lie to assumptions that any man in that professional field must be gay, Zohan routinely provides raucous sexual favors for all of his older female customers. The sight of bottles of gels and hairsprays falling off shelves while the indefatigable Zohan pleasures randy grannies on the other side of a salon wall is pure SNL, and is funnier than it might sound. The silly story involves an old, Palestinian enemy of Zohan, the Phantom (John Turturro), showing up in Manhattan, but everything is really leading to a Big Apple version of the resolution of Israeli-Palestinian conflicts we'd all like to see on a large scale. The film is almost instantly forgettable, and there are many times it veers toward the dumb, but it also sells itself well as a nutty concept. --Tom Keogh

Stills from You Don?t Mess with the Zohan (click for larger image)