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If “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” isn’t the bravest movie ever made about current Arab-Israeli relations, it’s at least the bravest movie ever made about current Arab-Israeli relations featuring a former Mossad agent who shags Lainie Kazan.
Nothing freaks the filmmakers out. Adam Sandler, as the agent, catches fish with his derriere, while John Turturro plays a Palestinian terrorist mastermind who opens a fast-food shack. The movie pretends this is all perfectly normal for almost two blissfully arbitrary hours.
Zohan is a celebrated government assassin who, tired of fighting Palestinians, fakes his death and flees to Manhattan to realize his dream of doing American hair. On the trip west, Zohan gives himself a makeover that turns him from a shaggy Hacky Sack enthusiast into a goateed Ben Affleck look-alike. Rejected from one of Paul Mitchell’s salons (he drools over “The Lexington” and other haircuts in an ancient Mitchell style book), Zohan seeks work in a Palestinian-run salon, managed by a no-nonsense beauty (Emmanuelle Chriqui). The parlor’s on a street split between Israelis and Arabs.
Lest anyone know he’s alive, Zohan works under the name Scrappy Coco and moves in with Kazan and her grown baby of a son (Nick Swardson). At the salon, he starts sweeping up hair and, after his big styling break, winds up the star of the shop, the lines of women out the door testifying as much to Zohan’s way with a flamboyantly ugly haircut as to his lascivious determination to sex them up afterward. He never admits it, but his hero appears to be Warren Beatty in “Shampoo,” not Mitchell.
Alas, the hair isn’t all that’s a mess. The film has a drab, budgetless look, and thdirector Dennis Dugan, making his fourth Sandler picture, shows a kind of negative aptitude for filmmaking. It’s all he can do to keep the jokes afloat. But the movie’s grubbiness actually makes the winking, sub-Hong Kong action sequences (Sandler delivering a flying kick sideways in real time, for example) surreally funny. The movie’s visual tackiness accessorizes nicely with its hero’s.

boston.com