You Don't Mess with the Zohan

Zohan coasts on its premise far more often than it fulfills it. But these days, you take your laughs where you find them. It's a pretty good scattershot comedy.

Raunchy and uneven, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan is a sporadically hilarious movie that makes good use of Adam Sandler’s considerable if oft-neglected talent.

Sandler wrote Zohan with Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow, and amid many of their very funny ideas is a plot that doesn't declare itself until the last rushed act.

Adam Sandler's new comedy is shameless in its eagerness to extract laughs from every possible breach of taste or decorum, and why am I even mentioning taste and decorum in this context?

The film has an ethnic or racial joke to go along with each of its can't-we-all-get-along sermons, which makes the heavy-handed and obvious speechifying go down a lot easier.

Crude, idiotic, ridiculous -- in other words, flat-out hilarious, and Sandler's funniest film in years.

You Don't Mess with the Zohan is a zany, over-the-top comedy on steroids most of the time.

For fans of physical humor, Sandler performs impossible deeds of athletic prowess with the aid of computer animation and prosthetic feet.

You Don't Mess with the Zohan is about as sweet and thoughtful as a movie that opens with an Adam Sandler crotch shot could be.

It’s sweet that Adam Sandler wants to see peace in the Middle East. But I don’t think You Don't Mess with the Zohan is going to break the diplomatic ice.

It is juvenile, but it also has a subject and, stunning as it is to report, that subject is the perpetual conflict in the Middle East.

For all of Adam Sandler’s juvenile comedies, You Don't Mess with the Zohan ranks up there and should please those Sandler-ites out there.

Does any of this cross the line? Sure. Most of it does. There's even a joke about a homemade bomb, though believe it or not, it's funny.

Zohan is strictly a predictable affair, with a steady flow of raunchy, off-color humor and more bare behinds than most viewers will care to see.

You Don't Mess with the Zohan shoots mass quantities of hummus at the wall, and surprisingly, quite a bit of it sticks.

Less like The Waterboy and more like I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, only funny.

It has the unruly dumb-silly energy that characterizes Sandler's best material.

If one-note jokes that drag on too long or are worked into the ground aren't enough to trigger comic nausea, then perhaps the myriad uses of hummus will do the trick in You Don't Mess with the Zohan.

Considering how repetitive it is, You Don't Mess with the Zohan is intermittently fresh and amusing in a low-down yet schmaltzy way.

You Don't Mess with the Zohan is aggressively, relentlessly stupid, which is a slightly wordier way of saying it's an Adam Sandler movie.

Although there is an onslaught of sexual content and a parade of guest stars in cameos, the essential conservatism of the project guarantees that there are absolutely no surprises in a padded 112 minutes.

Like too many comedies these days, the humor is based more on the concept than execution (Zohan has sex with old women = funny) and the scripting is lazy.

Big, silly, sex-happy fun that earns belly laughs even from viewers who have no idea why an Israel/Lebanon Hacky-Sack championship is supposed to be funny.

You Don't Mess with the Zohan, Sandler's first collaboration with co-writer and current Hollywood comedy godhead Judd Apatow, is a crazed, delightfully bizarre return to form for Sandler.

Zohan won't make you feel very good about your own intelligence, but it is the funniest Adam Sandler movie since Big Daddy.

If silliness equaled greatness, You Don't Mess with the Zohan would instantly join Citizen Kane and It's A Wonderful Life high atop the pantheon of great American films.

Adam Sandler offers his entry in the summer sweepstakes today with You Don't Mess with the Zohan, the rare comedy that has everything but laughs. I kid.

Exactly what we have come to expect in an Adam Sandler movie: It's stupid, the story (such as it is) is absurd and the acting consists largely of Sandler and his pals hamming it up whenever possible.

You Don't Mess with the Zohan is terrible in many ways, and shoddy in every way that has to do with filmmaking.

The story lacks the consistent rhythm of the film's running handful of gags.

Sending in Sandler to deal with the ages-old conflict between Arabs and Jews is like casting Al Gore in a gross-out comedy: He's simply the wrong man for the job.

If James Bond was an Israeli commando who secretly aspired to be Warren Beatty in Shampoo then he would be Adam Sandler's title character in the new comedy You Don't Mess with the Zohan.

The film strikes an uneasy balance between lowbrow slapstick and topical stuff. When’s the last time you saw a film mine laughs from the Palestinian intifada?

Starts and finishes strong with some sharp observations about ethnic animosity and stereotypes.

Sandler looks uncharacteristically buff -- though that may be one of the movie's many cheesy special effects.

It's the Middle East crisis played for laughs, and it gets a few until the movie backs off its bolder notions.

Sandler is shrewd enough to punctuate 90 minutes of group insults with a phony plea that we should all get along.

The most interesting aspect of the movie is the message that the solution for ancient ethnic hatreds is for everybody to move to America and hustle.

Sitting through You Don't Mess with the Zohan is a chore.

A clumsy, scattershot fiasco that's more likely to offend those with astute comedic taste than anyone on either side of the Israeli-Palestine equation.

The biggest problem is Zohan himself. He's completely infallible, which is a little funny at first as deals with impossible situations with ridiculous ease, but it just gets less and less funny as it goes on.

Zohan’s why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along exhortations are disarmingly sincere, but they’re also couched so deeply in Sandler-brand comic mediocrity that the gesture barely seems worth it.

Like other Saturday Night Live alums of his era, Sandler has an affection for over-the-top characters that would work best in a short sketch.

Like other Saturday Night Live alums of his era, Sandler has an affection for over-the-top characters that would work best in a short sketch.

Self-described "moron" comic Adam Sandler makes his big statement on the Middle East in You Don't Mess with the Zohan, a lowbrow comedy with high ambitions.

This unwieldy, frequently appalling comedy is a mishmash of skit characters run amok, hyperbolic Naked Gun-style sight gags, raunchy humor and faint stabs at relevance.

Zohan is a departure of sorts for Sandler, who's never before made a comedy so politically tinged.

You Don't Mess with the Zohan might actually be the stupidest movie with good intentions that I've ever seen.

For every mildly fresh gag -- say, the hacky-sack game played with a cat as the sack -- there are 40 jokes about Zohan's bulging groin and sexual prowess.

Evidently there's something even harder to pull off than Middle Eastern peace: a steady run of jokes that deserve our laughter -- if You Don't Mess with the Zohan is an indicator.

For every joke that works in this often-poor-taste comedy, there's at least 10 that don't. And even the handful of workable jokes aren't really that funny.

It's as if the filmmakers crammed everything they could think of into a blender and hit the "grate" button, yielding an unappetizing oversupply of tastelessness.

It took three top-rank comedy writers with dozens of hits under their belts -- Adam Sandler, Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow -- to create a 113-minute film with one joke.

If Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow work together on Apatow's next project, as they are apparently planning to do, they would be well-advised to sit down first and watch Zohan as an example of what to avoid.

You have to hand it to the slick geniuses who produced the trailer to this film -- they actually made this premise look funny.

The movie may be about terrorism, but we're the ones held hostage.

Stupid, tasteless and repetitive, You Don't Mess with the Zohan is just what I've come to expect from Adam Sandler -- as have his fans.

The script -- written by Sandler, Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow -- has a couple of actually funny gags, but hack director Dennis Dugan messes up the delivery in service to Sandler's titanic ego.

Sandler is sloppy. He gets one idea - and doesn't try for a second one. He doesn't think things through. He tries to get by on charm, glosses over plot holes with gross jokes and tries the audience's patience.

This is one of those movie ideas that leaves you wondering what other ideas, exactly, were rejected in favor of this one, on the grounds of being too lame.

The stereotypes are broad, unoriginal and offensive, and the only possible defense available of the script is that it makes fun of everyone

Zohan’s plot is so inconceivably inane you have to wonder if Sandler actually bought a studio to get it made.

Dennis Dugan reaches too far for laughs in a script that awkwardly tries to balance comedy with Middle East tensions while marrying sexual escapades with slapstick.

This is vintage lowbrow Sandler sniggering, mostly at the expense of minorities.