In Divided Times, Maybe It’s Worth Watching ‘You Don’t Mess With The Zohan’ Again?

The rave reviews and awards buzz greeting Adam Sandler’s performance in Uncut Gems, the latest film from Good Time directors Joshua and Benjamin Safdie, suggest it’s again time to start taking Adam Sandler seriously (as we seemingly do every few years when Sandler makes an acclaimed movie). But such talk almost always comes with a distinction between Serious Sandler and Silly Sandler. Serious Sandler makes films like Punch-Drunk Love, Spanglish, and The Meyerowitz Stories with directors like Paul Thomas Anderson, James L. Brooks, and Noah Baumbach. Silly Sandler makes movies like The Do-Over and Grown Ups and works with directors like Steven Brill and Dennis Dugan (over and over). But while it might be a mistake to try to read profound significance into, say, The Waterboy, there’s at least some point on the Venn diagram of the two Sandlers that overlaps: You Don’t Mess with the Zohan.

One matter to get out of the way first: You Don’t Mess with the Zohan is a #problematic movie in one really obvious respect. Made today, it’s almost certain that a film in which John Turturro and Rob Schneider both play Palestinians would meet with howls of protest, for understandable reasons. But the passage of time has made it look like a relic of the past in other, far more bittersweet ways as well. You Don’t Mess with the Zohan offers a vision of the United States as a place where differences get forgotten and people of all beliefs learn to live side-by-side via the story of a superhumanly lethal Israeli counter-terrorist operative who fakes his death and heads to America to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming a hairdresser.

Directed by Dugan and released in the summer of 2008, the film has even older roots. Sandler co-wrote the script with Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow in the ’90s, but they put the first draft of the script aside after 9/11, when the thought of a comedy dealing with terrorism and Middle Eastern politics became unthinkable. By the late-’00s it remained a tricky proposition, one that probably would never have come to be without a star of Sandler’s stature.

It also helped that, for most of the movie, political satire takes a backseat to more familiar bits of Sandler humor. As Zohan Dvir, Sandler plays a man who’s come to take his ability to, say, best a bull at a game of tug-of-war or chase a jet ski by bouncing across the surface of the water like a dolphin. He’s also grown tired of fighting, and contributing to an endless conflict in which the terrorists he arrests one day get traded for Israeli hostages the next, beginning the cycle anew. (“They’ve been fighting for 2000 years. It can’t be much longer,” his mother assures him.) Chucking it all, he arrives in New York with a fashion sense and musical taste still stuck in the 1980s. There he struggles to find his dream job until he gets a chance in a small neighborhood salon. The only problem: it’s run by Dalia (Emmanuelle Chriqui), a woman born in Palestine, and operates on the Palestinian side of the street. Though Zohan’s worried, his friend Oori, another Israeli immigrant tells him not to worry. “No, no, no, no, look,” Oori says,. “Nobody kill you there. Here nobody care.”

To Zohan, that’s no small thing, and living in a country where that kind of conflict exists as background noise, where it exists at all, takes some getting used to. But, over the course of an unrepentantly goofy film that finds Zohan both slapping a man with his feet and bedding a parade of older women who start to patronize the shop for his attentions, a warm image of America as a place where differences fade fade away starts to emerge. In one running gag, the would-be terrorist Salim (Rob Schneider, again, #problematic) has trouble rallying others to his cause because they’re too busy with kids’ soccer games or questioning moves made by the New York Mets. Who has time to fight with all that going on?

Sandler’s performance helps sell that vision, too. He plays Zohan as a man with world-weary eyes but bottomless drive, someone who’s committed to making his dream a reality (even after just showing up a Paul Mitchell salon and asking for a job doesn’t work out). Zohan’s confidence also turns the film into a culture clash comedy without the clash. No matter who objects, Zohan never doubts his liberated approach to sex or taste in music, at one point getting club moving with a Rockwell song (while scratching the record with his crotch).

He also falls in love, unexpectedly, with Dalia, in part after they bond over a desire to leave the extreme views of their families behind. In You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, it’s always outside forces that get in the way of peace and ideas not one-to-one connections that make the world a more difficult place. When a real enemy emerges, it’s in the form of a New York real estate tycoon (hmmm….) named Grant Walbridge (Michael Buffer of “Let’s get ready to rumble!” fame). To clear out the neighborhood that’s home to Oori’s electronics shop and Dalia’s salon, he attempts to sew religious discord (hmmm…) while conspiring with white supremacists (hmmm…). But when Zohan makes peace both with Salim and his archnemesis, the equally superhuman Phantom (Turturro), Walbridge doesn’t stand a chance.

It’s a lovely, deeply optimistic depiction of the uniquely American belief that what unites us ultimately matters more than what divides us. It also, sadly, feels far more quaint than a film released just 11 years ago ought to feel. Released in one election season — it even contains some off color commentary about the relative attractiveness of various family members involved in the 2008 race — it’s worth revisiting as we head into another. And as Sandler’s name starts to come up in the lead-up to the Oscars more and more it’s a reminder that it’s sometimes worth even taking Silly Sandler seriously.

Keith Phipps writes about movies and other aspects of pop culture. You can find his work in such publications as The Ringer, Slate, Vulture, and Polygon. Keith also co-hosts the podcasts The Next Picture Show and Random Movie Night and lives in Chicago with his wife and child. Follow him on Twitter at @kphipps3000.

Where to stream You Don't Mess With The Zohan