Pun Salad

I enjoyed this silly over-the-top movie quite a bit more than the critics did (34% Tomatometer) or the IMDB masses (5.7/10).

Adam Sandler plays the title character; he's an Israeli commando with semi-super powers: indestructibility, super-strength, and mad parkour skills. But he's tired of fighting Palestinian terrorists; when he captures them, they just get traded back for captured Israelis. And he's always had this dream of styling hair. So he fakes his own death, stows away on a New York-bound jet, and tries to make it in the mad world of the Manhattan beauty industry.

It kept me laughing all the way through, which is pretty good. Adam Sandler employs a lot of his buddies from Saturday Night Live in various-sized roles: Chris Rock, Kevin Nealon, Rob Schneider, Robert Smigel. Shelley Berman plays Zohan's father; I'm proud to say that I recognized him pretty quickly. He's 82, and IMDB says he's working pretty regularly. Good for him.

It might seem extra-tricky to have a comedy that touches on terrorism; Zohan deals with that by keeping the fantasy element high, not actually showing anyone getting killed, and pretending that all we need is for the politicians to get out of the way because us normal people can get along just fine, blah, blah, blah. This requires switching off certain brain functions for a bit; if you can manage that, you'll be fine.

But maybe we can all be brought together by Mariah Carey singing the national anthem at a Israel/Palestine hacky sack tournament. All I know is, it seemed plausible in the movie.