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 co-wrote with Sandler and Saturday Night Live 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.

Dir Dennis Dugan 2008. USA. 113 mins. Adam Sandler, John Turturro, Emmanuelle Chiriqui.