JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

You Don’t Mess With The Zohan is the most perceptive analysis of the Middle East problem in the cinema, with crotch shots, hummus jokes, truly terrible hair, bad early 90s music, and Israeli hiphop. Its astute conclusion: War is 20 years behind the curve, so baduy—like disco with collateral damage. This film may well be the masterpiece of Adam Sandler’s career, which has covered the rage of the golf pro in Happy Gilmore, the agony of the 80s New Wave in The Wedding Singer, the incipient humanity of Satan’s retarded love child in Little Nicky, discrimination against poor reptile-eating white trash in The Waterboy, amnesia and the question of identity in 50 First Dates, and gay rights in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. (My least favorite Sandlers are Mr. Deeds, Click, and Big Daddy even if Jon Stewart was in it.) My sister and I have adored him since his opera singer bits in Saturday Night Live, and he has consistently achieved my highest standard for comedy: his stupid gags make food shoot out of my nose. 

Zohan features the Jewish-American Sandler as an Israeli counter-terrorist, the Italian-American John Turturro as a Palestinian terrorist (the Rocky hommage—brilliant), and the Jewish-American-Filipino Rob Schneider as a Palestinian who does telemarketing while driving a New York taxi. The screenplay seems to have been written by guys who have just survived a Tito, Vic and Joey movie marathon, with choreography straight out of Eat Bulaga. In an industry stifled by political correctness, Zohan delights in racial stereotypes, sexism, and ageism. It’s wonderful.  

On the genesis of Zohan: Remember Ethan Zohn the cute Jewish guy who won Survivor? He had curls and he played hacky sack. Was the character based on him? Then there were those two agents who left Mossad to become hairdressers in America. I sense a Pinoy influence on Sandler’s movie, which co-stars Schneider and Alec Mapa (He’s a scream on Ugly Betty). Apart from the gags that would be perfectly at home in a Joey de Leon movie, there’s the name of the salon at the end of the movie (Oops, spoiler). Dalohan, as in Dalia+Zohan.