Philadelphia Weekly

Adam Sandler: disrespected auteur?

The box office's most reliable idiot man-child has grown a good deal more interesting as he's settled into middle age. Always the consummate businessman while remaining painfully aware of his audience's limited expectations, Sandler has nonetheless managed to build a dependable brand with his Happy Madison Productions. Distinguished by their slapdash filmmaking, egregious product placements, gratuitous cameos for unemployed SNL veterans and a sentimental streak 100 yards long, these pictures have begun shimmering with a frisson of something else--weirdly inarticulate lunges at artistic ambition.

To clarify, we're not discussing Sandler's neglected actor-for-hire work outside his self-generated projects. (I take a backseat to no man in my adoration for P.T. Anderson's glorious Punch-Drunk Love, and Sandler's fine performances highlighted the otherwise iffy Reign Over Me and James L. Brooks' woebegone Spanglish.)

But I am thinking about the strangely affecting melancholy that seeped into 50 First Dates, or the starkly unpleasant, joke-free mortality-wallow that made the second half of his dopey Click feel like an amateur-hour All That Jazz. Even last year's atrocious I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry topped off two hours of snickering homophobia with a po-faced, tear-jerking plea for tolerance from the producer/star. Sandler's clearly wrestling with his influence these days.

Nobody makes a movie as restless, freaky and all over the map as You Don't Mess With the Zohan unless they've got a hell of a lot on their mind. The film is a bloody mess, but it'll also never be confused with the sort of phoned-in star vehicle somebody of Sandler's stature could easily coast his way through. To paraphrase the late Spalding Gray: His subconscious is so close to the surface you can see its periscope.

Klutzily lurching between inspiration and inanity, Zohan stars Sandler as a supernaturally skilled Mossad agent bored by the cycle of Middle Eastern strife. He fights with an unfunny double-jointed dexterity. He's so slick he makes balloon animals out of the rocks hurled at him by Palestinian children and has a knack for wrapping his opponents into helpless pretzel shapes. Tired of capturing and recapturing his arch-nemesis the Phantom (played with the usual reckless abandon by John Turturro), Sandler's Zohan makes like Mickey Rourke's tormented IRA assassin from A Prayer for the Dying, fakes his own death and heads for America.

It's a whole new world over here, one full of gaudy electronics stores and easy jabs at tacky Middle Eastern stereotypes. But what Zohan really wants is to become a professional hairstylist, even if such a disreputable dream must force him to swallow his pride and get a job on "the Palestinian side of the street." He finds his calling, and also his true love, in salon owner Dalia (the radiant Emmanuelle Chriqui)--a romantic situation complicated not just by hundreds of years of ethnic strife, but also by Zohan's cheerful penchant for sexually servicing his elderly female customers. (Yes, there's even a money shot of Adam Sandler doing it doggy-style with Lainie Kazan. Adjust your concession stand purchases accordingly.)

Picking up plotlines for brief intervals only to drop them just as quickly, the leisurely paced, crazily overlong You Don't Mess With the Zohan also finds time for an unamusing arena hacky-sack competition that's just a convenient smokescreen for some evil white land developers. Hoping to level the block and build a mall, they hire a homegrown redneck terrorist and diehard Mel Gibson fan (Dave Matthews, tongue jammed firmly in cheek) to stage phony hate-bombings and transform the entire neighborhood into an N.Y.C. version of the Gaza Strip.

Sandler wrote the script with TV Funhouse genius Robert Smigel plus the ubiquitous Judd Apatow, and Zohan posits a lovely world wherein everybody could eventually just get along and eat hummus together, if they wise up and unite against their corporate landlords. Or, as an Israeli character finally confesses to an Arab cabdriver: "Everyone here hates us because they think we're you."

There are almost enough shockingly insightful left-field throwaways like that one to make you ignore all the old-lady gross-out sex, oversized penis jokes and Sandler company regular Dennis Dugan's typically abysmal, inattentive direction, which this time includes an endless CGI sequence of characters playing hacky-sack with a cat.

But you'll leave mulling the plight of Sandler's obviously autobiographical Zohan, scoring cheap laughs just as easily as he twists bodies into pretzels. He's bored with the old game and wanting to offer something more. Whether that means feathered hairstyles or meatier projects, here's a guy aching to break out of this rut.