You Don't Mess with the Zohan

You Don't Mess with the Zohan is a 2008 American action comedy film directed by Dennis Dugan and primarily written by Adam Sandler, who stars as the tiular character. It is about Zohan Dvir, an unnaturally talented counter-terrorist of the Israel Defense Forces who is considered the best at his job. Eventually, he feels like retiring from his job to work as a hairstylist, which is his dream. He manages to escape to New York and find a job there. But it seems he still has to deal with some palestinians there as well.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) Cool performances, especially from Adam Sandler as Zohan. John Turturro is an amusing pick for Phantom.
 * 2) Plenty of funny moments, like when Zohan tells the DJ at a disco party to play some 80s music, only for Zohan to twist him into a pretzel-like shape and play the music anyways.
 * 3) There are multiple cool scenes, especially the action scenes where Zohan does superhuman things like quickly disassembling a gun held by a terrorist and where he swims as fast as a powerboat while chasing Phantom.
 * 4) The black comedy does itself well, including the caricaturing of the Middle East (mostly their way of speaking) and the sex jokes.
 * 5) The infamous climax where Zohan and Phantom yell together to stop the arsonists (who are racist rednecks) who made two sides fight each other.
 * 6) The concept of a talented man who's great at combat but wants a friendly job has a nice execution in this film (Phantom also has an idea like that, but you should see for yourselves).

Bad Qualities

 * 1) Like other Happy Madison movies, it still had product placement, which is something that would be expected in the typical Adam Sandler Movie.
 * 2) The story is a bit predictable.

Critical reception
Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 37% based on 188 reviews; the site's consensus is that the film "features intermittent laughs, and will please Sandler diehards, but after a while the leaky premise wears thin." Metacritic gives the film a rating of 54 out of 100, based on 37 reviews—indicating mixed or average reviews.

John Podhoretz, in The Weekly Standard, wrote that the movie has a "mess" of a plot and features, "as usual for Sandler, plenty of dumb humor of the sort that gives dumb humor a bad name, but that delights his 14-year-old-boy fan base." But the film also has an "unusual" amount of "tantalizing comic ideas" so that "every 10 minutes or so, it makes you explode with laughter." Entertainment Weekly gave the movie a C+ grade, calling it "another 'mess' from Sandler" which is, unlike Monty Python, a "circus that never flies."

On the positive side, Time claimed the film to be a "laff scuffle,"[14] and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 3 out of 4 stars.[15] David Edelstein of New York Magazine went as far as to say "Adam Sandler is mesmerizing,"[16] and A.O. Scott of The New York Times said it was "the finest post-Zionist action-hairdressing sex comedy I have ever seen."

Box office
You Don't Mess with the Zohan grossed $38 million on its opening weekend, ranked second behind Kung Fu Panda. As of September 7, 2008, it reached a US tally of $100 million. The film grossed $204.3 million worldwide.