Worst Film of the Year

For the first time since I began watching films as a child, I am completely speechless.  I have absolutely no idea what it was I just witnessed, but it was not cinema.  It couldn’t have been.  I can’t even review it.  I’m quite confident that I’ll forget it entirely within the next hour of my life, and I hope the same for anyone else unfortunate enough to have watched it.

Adam Sandler has managed to create something worse than Little Nicky.  And I’m a fan of Little Nicky.  But You Don’t Mess With the Zohan is such a mess it can’t even be considered a movie.  It’s not trash.  It’s not art.  And it’s certainly not entertaining. 

Let me describe what happens within the first twenty minutes of the film.  Adam Sandler (the Zohan) arrives at a beach.  He interrupts a game of hacky sack by playing in; a scene when ends with Sandler catching the sack between his butt cheeks, blinking at a female observer, then ‘shooting’ it back up into the game.  Apparently, this teaches us that ‘you don’t mess with the zohan’.

The next scene involves him playing tug of war.  He’s by himself, while a female rides on his shoulders, and pulling against three or four grown, muscular men.  He, of course, wins without difficulty.

We flash to later, Sandler is cooking on the beach, naked, while his male friend and three females all dance and try to get him to stop.  He says he can’t, that he’s busy cooking.  They mock him for cooking, so he responds by ‘discoing’, something I can only describe as shaking his manhood back and forth.  He goes back to cooking, tossing fish onto plates at a nearby table, but not before, you guessed it, catching one between his butt cheeks while on all fours.  That’s right.

Sandler is then picked up by a military helicopter and as he’s taken away from the party, he dances on the side of it.  No lie.

Back at the base, in what was literally the only tolerable scene in the first twenty minutes, Sandler’s informed that a terrorist named The Phantom (Sandler friend John Turturro) has escaped.  Sandler ends up volunteering to go in with two other soldiers to capture the Phantom.

There’s a scene where he cries about wanting to cut hair, and another where he tells his parents about wanting to cut hair.  They laugh.  We don’t.

Then we cut to the mission.  He heads in, mostly alone, in what looks to be something out of The Bourne franchise.  Then, without real reason, the Zohan goes flying through the air, sideways, and kicks a terrorist through a wall.  Then a second one.  He’s held at gunpoint, to which he responds by turning around and dissembling the gun before the terrorist has a chance to fire.  Later, he’s approaching another terrorist who shoots at him.  He dodges the first bullet, catches the second one between his fingers, then catches the third in his nostril.  You read that right.

Then he finds the Phantom, who’s standing, for reasons not explained, upside down on a ceiling.  Sandler chases him out into the ocean, where the two argue about whether or not they can feel pain.  Phantom grabs a fish (piranha?) from the water and attaches it to his neck as proof that he can’t be hurt.  Sandler removes the fish and drops it down his pants.  Again, you read that right.  The Phantom even sneaks a peak down there to make sure what he thinks is happening is happening.  It is.

Phantom then removes a hand grenade and the two characters remove paddles from somewhere on their bodies and begin hitting the grenade back and forth as if playing ping pong.  Sandler lobs it up into the air, it explodes in the ocean, and Sandler remains hidden underwater; faking his death so he can escape to America.

And it was here that I hit the stop button, so I could escape this holy mess.  As I said in the beginning, I have no idea what I just witnessed. 

As a fan of Sandler, I’m embarrassed.  I never thought I’d say this, but maybe he should stick to things like Spanglish and Punch Drunk Love.  Or maybe he just needs to associate himself with a director who won’t have him catching things in his butt. 

Maybe.