Same old shtick, new decade
The story seems unlikely, and pretty basic. Adam Sandler plays “Zohan”, an Israeli counter terrorist who can leap tall buildings and catch flying bullets with his nostril. Zohan is the best of the best… but as with any good hero story, Zohan has a problem. The problem is not his inability to do his job, quite the contrary; he seems invincible in this flick. Zohan’s problem comes from within. While he is the very best counter terrorist that Israel has ever seen, Zohan would rather be styling hair at the Paul Mitchell salon in New York City.
Sadly, his parents are unsupportive, and question his sexuality at the very mention of this desire. Zohan fakes his death in a grenade ping-pong match with his Palestinian nemesis “Phantom”. With everyone in Israel and Palestine thinking he is dead, Zohan smuggles himself into a crate with some dogs and sneaks his way into New York City.
Lets push pause for a moment on the story of Zohan. This film has trouble deciding where it is going… which made it a very hard comedy to watch. The first ten minutes had me laughing at the obscenity of how ridiculous the pretense for this film was. The problem was, it kept escalating in an attempt to out-weird itself.
The scenes went from Zohan catching a fish with his buttocks, to Zohan …ahem… “making the beast with two backs” with every elderly woman who came to see him as a stylist. I felt like I was being treated to a script written by several drunk teenagers proclaiming in each subsequent scene, “Oh my gosh, wasn’t that weird? Hilarious right? No… well, what if I do THIS instead? Shocked? That has to be funny!”
With his more recent works, Adam Sandler has become victim of his entourage. I think hanging out with the same friends (who he casts in all his movies) Adam Sandler doesn’t have anybody around him to say, “Man, that’s just not funny.” He seems to think if he does something outlandish, it will be funny by shock value alone. This isn’t always true… while that mentality worked well for him on Saturday Night Live (who didn’t think crazy newspaper hand man was funny?), we haven’t seen any growth or development in his comedy style since he first started making films in the early nineties.
With these shocking moments and unlikely characters we are left with little more than a series of funny moments sandwiched in a plethora of mediocrity. The attempt to address the Israeli and Palestinian conflict at the end with a message of peace thinly veils the fact that this movie is choc full of racist middle eastern stereotypes at the height of a time when our culture really shouldn’t be embracing any more “terrorist” jokes or clichés.
Who cares? I love Adam Sandler!
Good point. That’s the only reason he still has a career, lots of people just love Adam Sandler despite his inability to produce anything but spin-offs from his Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore days. (He even non-verbally admits it in the name of his production company, “Happy Madison”).
If you are an Adam Sandler fan, you’ll probably enjoy this film. With guest appearances from many of Adam Sandler’s long time friends (Kevin Nealon, Rob Schneider, and even Dave Matthews to name a few) and direction from Dennis Dugan (Big Daddy, Happy Gilmore, and more), fans of Sandler’s work will see many familiar faces throughout this picture.
This Blu-Ray disc contains the standard special features we’ve become accustomed to on a DVD release, with a couple Blu-Ray extras. You get both regular and extended releases of the movie. There is a BDLive section, and a “Translating the Zohan” graphic in picture track. There is commentary with Adam Sandler, Robert Smigel, Rob Schneider and Nick Swardson. There is a separate commentary with director Dennis Dugan, deleted scenes, previews and section called featurettes. The featurettes section contains 10 different mini features about or relating to the film.
As with the DVD release of this film, I wasn’t really impressed with the special features included on the Zohan Blu-Ray release. For nearly $40 MSRP you’d really expect a better experience. Price is what will drive the Blu-Ray format’s success, and at this price I can’t recommend this film for your collection.