THIS JERK SAYS

Hi there, all you shiny happy people out there!  I’m the jerk, and as you may have guessed, this is my movie blog.  If you’re reading one of my older reviews, you may notice that it’s prefaced with some rather non-sequitir-ish comments and whatnot.  That’s because the previous posts before this one were copy/pasted from my personal blog over on Myspace.  From now on, however, all of my reviews will be exclusively posted here, along with some of my original writings and such if enough people are interested.

Anywho, my first original post on this blog takes a look at one of the summer’s bigger comedic outings, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.  So, is the Zohan worth messing with in the first place?

PLOT:

SNL legend and perpetual-third-grader Adam Sandler returns, this time as Zohan, an Israeli counter-terrorist who wants to get out of the endless fighting and become a hair stylist in America.  Starting a new life in New York, he eventually has to unite the bickering Israeli and Palestinian immigrant communities to stop an evil business tycoon from tearing down their homes and building a mall, while falling in love with his Palestinian co-worker and fending off his old rival.  Throw in a couple of ham-fisted diatribes about how casting aside the thousands of years of hatred between the two peoples is as easy as discovering they all want to bone Laura Bush, and you’re pretty much set.

STYLE:

Like most of these one-note-character movies, there’s a lot of time spent on intentionally-fake-looking slapstick effects, and from there it follows the typical formula of every Happy Madison movie.  Expect the usual round of “surprise” cameos and deliberate lampshade-hanging.

ACTING:

Sandler does his damnedest to clone Sascha Baron Cohen’s Borat, with a little brown makeup to try and pretend it’s a different character.  What’s sad is I’m well aware he’s capable of much much better: his roles in Spanglish and Punch Drunk Love demonstrated that he’s able to do more than just these one-dimensional bits, so it’s disappointing to see he’s regressed back into that.  The same can be said of John Turturo (The Phantom), Nick Swardson (Michael), Rob Schneider (Salim), and pretty much the rest of the entire cast.  The only character who comes off like an honest-to-God human being is Emmanuelle Chriqui (Dalia), and even then it’s hard to like her since she gets saddled with all the hokey “can’t we all just get along?” speeches.

I will say that Michael Buffer (whom you might remember as the “LLLLLLET’S GET READY TO RUMBLE!!!” guy) is an almost perfect embodiment of the ’super-rich corporate douche’ in his role as Walbridge.  In fact, his whole scene in his boardroom felt like it was straight from the Dick Jones scenes in Robocop; I wouldn’t have flinched at all if the ED-209 stomped into the room and machine-gunned a lackey just for the hell of it.

ACTION/VIOLENCE:

Lots and lots of cartoonish fight scenes and stunts, the best of which was Zohan storming the Phantom’s hideout in the beginning of the movie.  And after this movie, I will never ask a stranger for a “pretzel” ever again.

ROMANCE/T&A:

As in all Adam Sandler movies, he gets to do a love story with a woman who is way out of his league, only this time with makeup and a horrendously fake accent.  There’s never any real scene where Dalia has a reason to “fall” for Zohan: one minute she’s trying like hell to get him to leave her alone, and the next they’re having a platonic-but-leading-towards-romantic day out in the park, after a montage of Zohan banging gross old women.

Yes, yes, there’s an entire subplot revolving around Zohan’s tendency to pork his elderly customers, most noticeably his friend Michael’s mom.  Lots and lots of gross-out sex humor ensues.  And I don’t know about you, but I really could’ve gone without seeing Adam Sandler’s ass at any time in my life.

On the plus side, Emmanuelle Chriqui is pretty damn gorgeous.

GRIPES:

Aside from the most obvious gripe I have (the blatantly racist portrayals of Israeli and Arabic stereotypes), Zohan seems to have banked all of its humor on the same four jokes, over and over again:

-Zohan has a large penis
-Zohan fights like a human Looney Toon
-Zohan likes to pork old women
-Middle Eastern people really like Hummus

After about the twenty-seventh hummus joke, it really starts to wear thin.  The whole thing feels like a five-minute SNL sketch stretched out to two hours.

Combined with the obnoxiously ignorant commentary on the struggles in the Middle East, and you begin to see my biggest gripe with this movie, and of just about all of Hollywood these days: it treats you like you are stupid.  Everything’s spelled out for you, none of the characters grow or change in any significant way, and all of the humor is aimed at the lower basic trains of thought.  Like all mainstream comedies, it’s marketed towards the lowest common denominator, and that means assuming everyone in the audience is an idiot.

OVERALL:

While I’ll freely admit it brings the funny on more than one occasion, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan is a brainless ego-vehicle for Sandler at best, an Al-Jolson-like blackface routine at worst.  Not trying anything that hasn’t been done before or even being the least bit clever, it’s a comedic placebo, some easy-to-swallow laugh candy with a sugary feel-good message about tolerance towards the people they just spent two hours mocking.

You Don’t Even Want to Bother with the Zohan.  Trust me.

This jerk’s thumb….is DOWN.

(on the bright side, the trailer for Hancock looked pretty damn fun)