Film

No Adam Sandler movie could bring peace to the Middle East, and this baggy, shoddily FX’d star vehicle—the story of a disco-loving Mossad agent (Sandler) who runs off to America to live out a real-life version of Shampoo—probably won’t help the cause. Hairdressing, of course, could just as well be any profession, and the broader comedy is predicated on the Israeli and Palestinian characters’ simple desire for a world without war. Strain and you can see the edge that Judd Apatow (who cowrote with Sandler and SNL polymath Robert Smigel) appears to have brought to the project; the movie’s funniest one-liners take risks, with such creations as Zohan’s Six Day War veteran father (“Six days and five hours—your generation likes to forget that”) and Hezbollah’s weapons-dispensing hotline (“We will resume services as soon as negotiations break down”).

But this is mostly tame stuff, leaning heavily on Zohan’s Hebraic-sounding patter, his tendency to overshare with customers about erections and finding new uses for the all-purpose balm that is hummus. So long as the movie is simply a fish-out-of-water comedy, that’s enough. (There’s also an amusing attempt to reassemble Sandler’s extended family, with cameos by Henry Winkler, John McEnroe and AMPAS president Sid Ganis.) The portrait of Turturro’s franchising terrorist flirts with trivialization, but that’s almost preferable to the last act, when Zohan must save his Palestinian-run salon (and fetching boss, Chriqui) from corporate takeover. Truly, Israelis and Palestinians could get along, Zohan seems to argue, if only they could experience the solidarity forged on a multiethnic New York block.