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You Don't Mess With The Zohan (12A)

Reviewed,Anthony Quinn
Friday 15 August 2008 00:00 BST
Comments

There is something deeply wrong with the world when Adam Sandler can get finance for a movie in which he stars as a Mossad agent with superpowers – "like Rembrandt with a grenade".

The one superpower Sandler will never master, I'm afraid, is the ability to be funny – though I did laugh when he high-fived a passing stork.

As Zohan, he tires of kicking Arab ass and hotfoots it to the US where he dons a huge codpiece, becomes a top hairdresser, and services the elderly matrons of lower Manhattan. He is pursued there by his Palestinian arch-rival The Phantom (John Turturro), and the movie becomes a sequence of riffs on the Arab-Israeli war, transposed to New York.

It finally proclaims a message of conciliation, exposing a Trump-like building-tycoon as the real villain, but it indulges and repeats so much of Sandler's juvenile sex shtick that by the end you'd agree not to mess with the Zohan if it meant never having to watch another Adam Sandler movie.

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