You Don’t Mess with the Zohan (Movie Review)

Alex Florez’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan review says your patience for Adam Sandler’s hummus jokes will tell you almost everything. The comedy is built around a superhuman Israeli agent who wants to quit fighting and become a hairdresser, and the movie either feels ridiculous enough to enjoy or exhausting fast.

Hummus is funny. Scratch that: hummus is hilarious. It’s got a weird name. It’s gooey. It’s foreign. Imagine if someone dipped their eyeglasses in hummus and then licked the hummus off. That would be pretty hysterical, right? Or what if someone combed hummus into his hair, put hummus on the cat, or used a whole giant tub of hummus to hose down a fire?

Or how about this: one rich New York executive asks another what hummus is, because how could he possibly know, and the second guy tells him, “It’s a very tasty diarrhea-like substance.”

How you respond to the preceding paragraph will probably give you a pretty good idea of whether you should see You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, Adam Sandler’s latest exploration of the cinema of adolescence. As is so often the case, Sandler plays a character pulled between the competing poles of masculine aggression and boyish sweetness. In his most ambitious performance, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, this duality was advertised right in the title.

This time, though, the split is literalized, or rather professionalized: Sandler’s Zohan is a superhuman Israeli counter-terrorism agent who wants to quit the army and become, wait for it, a hairdresser.

To this end, he fakes his own death in a confrontation with his Palestinian nemesis, the Phantom (John Turturro), and smuggles himself to New York in a dog carrier, taking his co-travelers’ names as his own, “Scrappy Coco.” Upon arrival, he immediately visits the Paul Mitchell salon looking for a job, pausing briefly to rub his crotch against the glass front door to signal his enthusiasm.

Remarkably, he does not find employment there, nor at a Black women’s hair boutique, nor at a kids’ barbershop. He eventually insinuates himself into a salon run by a beautiful Palestinian named Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui), where he sets about Warren Beattying his way through the clientele, à la Shampoo.

FAQ: You Don’t Mess with the Zohan

What is You Don’t Mess with the Zohan about?
Adam Sandler plays Zohan, an Israeli counter-terrorism agent who fakes his own death and moves to New York to become a hairdresser.

Why do people search for the Adam Sandler hummus movie?
The movie turns hummus into one of its biggest running jokes, which is why many searches remember the comedy through that gag more than the plot.

Is this a positive review?
The review is skeptical. It argues that whether the movie works depends almost entirely on how much patience you have for Sandler’s childish, absurdist humor.

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